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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 40 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 twelve books and the editor of Net Results magazine. Reach Bill here.

Back to Basics: Build Relationships

The second step in Jesus’ 5 step exponential church growth model is to build relationships (step 1 is to get some attention and increase your first-time visitor count).

This is part 2 of a five part series.

Most, but certainly not all, churches get a first-time visitor every now and then. And if you’re following the […]

Visitor Treatment: Case Study 01

Recently, I began interviewing folks who were first-time visitors to churches to listen to what they experienced and see what we can learn.

A couple weeks ago, I met with a couple who’d attended an Evangelical Free Church near them. Let me begin by saying that they had a pleasant experience and have considered returning […]

Is It The End of Contemporary Worship?

One of my coaching clients called me the other day and asked if I’d read an article by Jonathan Aigner about the end of contemporary worship. I confessed I hadn’t. This particular coaching client is a church planter and the core congregation she’s working with are predominantly life-long mainliners who were raised in church back […]

Back to Basics: 5 Ways to Increase Your First-Time Visitor Count

There are plenty of explanations why churches aren’t growing today … and frankly, most of what I read has a lot of merit. Culture’s changed. The church hasn’t … or it hasn’t kept up with the changes. Boomers left. Gen-X quit. Pre-Mills never got connected. The Millennials view church as so much yesterday’s yesterday.

On the […]

The Missional Church’s Mission

The other day I wrote a blog on preaching memorable, life changing sermons that drew a slew of controversy. It wasn’t about the preaching that was at odds, but a passing statement I made on my way to teaching how to make a sermon life changing. That statement was this:

One might have thought I’d […]

5 Ways You Make Your Guests Feel Comfortable

Church visitors come and church visitors go. And most of the time, it’s just like that. In a typical North American church, less than 15 percent of all first-time visitors ever return. Over the years, I’ve spoken with hundreds of business owners and every one of them has agreed – if they only retained […]

Turn Christmas Eve Visitors Into Returning Guests

Christmas Eve is fast approaching. Historically, your worship service/s on that holy night will have the highest number of visitors who have limited or no church experience. Indeed, the Nones are more likely to attend your Christmas Eve service than any other service of the year.

If your church is like the vast majority of North […]

Tools We Use: CoSchedule

Sometimes we get asked about the tools we use to do the things we do. This afternoon I was creating and scheduling some social media updates for the upcoming week and realized that there are quite a number of the church leaders we work with who are still doing social updates by hand.

Because all of […]

What to Say After “Hello”

I was at a church planting event some years ago when someone asked, “Tell me what you do.” Saying “I plant churches” didn’t seem to capture what I was doing, since I was already coaching other leaders and leading the occasional workshop on evangelism and church growth. But to be honest, I wasn’t prepared […]