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About Bill Tenny-Brittian

Bill is the Managing Partner at The Effective Church Group. He began ministry as a church planter in the early 1980s and over the past 35 years he's grown churches from one side of the nation to the other. In 2002 he joined Bill Easum's consultation group and began partnering with churches and church leaders to help them reach their fullest potential. He is the author of nine books and the editor of Net Results magazine. Reach Bill here.

Start the Conversation Right

I was asked recently, “How do I start a conversation with an unchurched person? Should I just ask about their church home or whether or not they go to church?”

Let’s think about this. If you ask an unchurched person whether or not they go to church, you’re effectively cutting off further conversation because their […]

Dr. Phil, Here

So, how’s that working for you?

Evaluation is the key to effectiveness, even in the church.

You have to ask … For each event, mission, or ministry that your church does:

What’s the return on investment? How many unchurched attend? How many have become connected with church members as friends (mentors into the faith)? […]

Shy Is Not a Disability

Let’s start off with a fact. You can’t change introversion. If you get exhausted being around a group of people (every group of people, not just certain ones), then you’re probably introverted. And introverted is “who” you are – it’s a personality trait that you can’t change on a whim.

However, according to lots of […]

A Leader People Want to Follow

What kind of a leader are you? There are several hundred books (at least!) that will help you discover that answer, but in my experience, there are really only three kinds of leaders. (1) Leaders with a position who don’t actually lead. Sorry folks, but I put the lassie faire style of leadership in […]

Butts and Bucks

For years, I’ve heard progressive church leaders decry the emphasis on numbers, especially average worship attendance and member giving. Like virtually every church consultation firm, we get accused and badmouthed for our continued insistence that the churches we work with provide us with their numbers for the previous ten years.

Numbers like:

Average worship attendancePer […]

It Starts at the Top

Culture Creation always starts at the top. And it generally ends at the top because most leaders aren’t consistent and the chief leader doesn’t have the backbone to actually hold those leaders accountable, so the culture doesn’t change. Ultimately, this is why so few churches turn back from decline … because the prevailing culture that facilitated […]

How to Pray When God Can’t Keep Your Attention

I was recently interviewed by Janelle Dixon about my book Prayer for People Who Can’t Sit Still. This is the article she wrote …

I was not blessed with a quiet mind. It’s a switchboard of
extemporaneous ideas, thoughts, memories and questions that is always on,
always lit up, always busy. Did I plug in the […]

Reader Question

Sometimes we get questions from our Contact Us page. When we do, we try to answer the query. Sometimes, the question is broad enough that it warrants a blog post of its own. Such is the case with this query …

“I read your target audience post and it made sense to me. Given our […]

War Ship Small Groups

I recently had a student who designed a new small group system for her church and called them War Ship Small Groups.

And she was uniformly eaten by a couple of students for using battle language … I guess because that kind of language is pointedly missing from the Bible (I don’t know which […]