The Enabler: Carl’s Ministry Blog

Anyone doing research on the growth of the Church in America will tell you there is a serious problem. In the younger age group of the Millennials (born 1984-2000), only one in ten attends Church. And this is the generation that has to carry the church to the next generation. Most of the current Church […]

Carl will be speaking Sunday, 2/26/2006 at Bethlehem Church in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The service starts at 10:00 am. All are welcome. His title will be “Believing is Seeing“.
“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”
Ralph Hodgson

If you are a leader in your church or organization, you often have the challenge of leading change and finding resistance; that is, people don’t want to change. Church Growth leaders are telling us the institutional church is failing. What type of change is needed? How should this be led? It reminds me of the […]

Our post quoting Andrew Strom is stirring a lot of interest. Let me carry the issue further by looking at the church attendance statistics by generation group. Generational definitions vary with the research, so we will define some boundaries here for our purposes.
Builders - Born 1926-1945
These are the people that built the institutions […]

Here is a VERY provacative book review of two books by Andrew Strom, a New Zealander:
BARNA’s ‘REVOLUTION’ - A Review by Andrew Strom.
2005 has seen the release of two of the most important and provocative books for the Western church in years. I am referring to James Rutz’s ‘MEGASHIFT’ and now George Barna’s ‘REVOLUTION’.
Even the […]

Want to see your church grow both spiritually and physically? So often we do this with secular and rational logic - look for what works and copy that. It is called stereotyping. You see a church growing using a seeker model, copy that. One leader in church consulting told me that only 2% of the […]

The Portland Monthly Mangazine ran and excellent profile of the city’s neighborhoods, including the suburbs. This is excellent material for a church starting to profile their neighborhood. The information included housing costs, school quality, population, crime stats, and more. The published values have been updated and are now online at:
https://www.portland-monthly.com/realestategrid.pdf

Note: These are good starting stats, […]

We live in a time where change is exploding dramatically. The Web (which hardly existed 10 years ago) is as necessary to most of us as the telephone. Those blogs on the web (some 2 dozen in 1999) now number over 11 million. My car is made in Japan; my next television will be made […]

Hebrews 11 tells us Abraham set out looking for a city whose foundation, builder, and maker was God. What was this city like that Abraham was looking for?
We know that Man had intimacy with God in the Garden. God created Man, loved him (and her), and this was a special place. Abraham (Hebrews 11:8) was […]

If you are any type of organization (and we are generally talking about a church or parachurch organization here), you should give serious consideration to how people enter your organization. What are your entry points? For a church, it might be the worship service, a children’s Sunday School, small group meetings in homes - what […]