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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.

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 […]

How to Hand Off Ministry

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to […]

What’s Indigenous?

When we do a church consultation, we always recommend that the worship services should be designed around their target audience … that worship should be indigenous to those you’re trying to reach. And so it happened that I was asked, “What do you mean by developing Indigenous Worship? What is indigenous worship?”

Ahh. Good question […]

Hope is Not a Strategy

One of the reasons small churches don’t grow is because they depend on “hope” as their core strategy. But hope is not a strategy. Very few church leaders have seriously worked through the strategies and logistics of what it takes to turn Visiting Victor into a disciple of Jesus. Instead, they “hope” he’ll figure […]

Get Visitors Back

We get asked about how to turn visitors into returning guests pretty regularly. Over the years, we’ve been gathering some of the best ideas we’ve seen. Recently, I put together a string of some of the best practices from first visit to membership for a pastoral student and thought it might be helpful here. […]