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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.

Three Hard Choices Effective Leaders Make

Effective church leadership is the most glamourless, thankless, and frustrating job on the planet.

I make that emphatic statement based on two observations. First, I’m unaware of any other sector, profit or non-profit, that is seeing 85 percent of all operation centers facing serious decline – and the leaders of course are shouldered with the […]

Failure is Certain

I had a conversation with a pastor recently who shared that in his family of origin, “failure was not an option.” And so, he was a careful planner who sought to get “all the data” he could before making a decision. I was reminded of Ecclesiastes 12:12
Be warned, my son, of anything in addition […]

The Consumer Church Metaphor

Church members don’t generally want to have their church compared to a business, but sometimes they just can’t help themselves and they fall into the metaphor themselves.

The board meeting had a motion on the floor to upgrade the brand of Sunday morning coffee to one that was more appealing to the younger generation that […]

Three Kinds of Church Members

A family left the church recently because they didn’t like one of the changes in worship. The pastor had been confronted by the board chair who demanded the pastor “Go after them and bring them back.” The pastor kept his cool and gently sidestepped the confrontation, but gave me (his coach) a call the […]

Has the Church Been Disassociated?

These verses, 6 and 15, frame a directive of what to do with those who are literally busybodies, people who have nothing better to do than make trouble. Apparently, the Thessalonian church had as high of a mercy gift as churches today. They were tolerating bad behaviors from their members and Paul says, “Stop it!”

There […]

The Model Church

1 Thessalonians 1:6–8
You became imitators of us and of the Lord … And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you … your faith has become known everywhere.
The Thessalonian church had, at least ostensibly, become models of a functional church. They became […]

There’s No Dignity in Death When …

Evangelistic fervor that reaches out beyond the church and into the culture. That’s the call to every follower of what Paul calls the Way in this extended passage. And yet evangelism is the least practiced of all Christian disciplines, including faithful stewardship. Yes, more people actually tithe than regularly share their faith with Nones, […]

10 Things to Do – Turnaround Mid to Large Sized Church

Recently, I wrote a post about starting a turnaround effort in a small church that’s been in decline for years (Ten Things to Do to Lead a Turnaround). I immediately got requests from church leaders of declining mid-sized and large churches: “What about us? What should we do?”

So, here is a list of things […]

7 Things To Do Outside the Church Office

I teach the Pastoral Leadership Course for the Mid-America Center For Ministry. It’s an eight-week online intensive on what it takes to be an effective leader in the church today. One of the things I teach during the course is that a pastor cannot grow the church by staying in their office. There’s always […]