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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.

You Can Do Better Than PowerPoint

I don’t tend to do blog posts that say, “Yeah, what he said,” but this is a rare exception. Seth Godin writes a business blog that I subscribe to. I started following him when he said some things about PowerPoint presentations that I found to be true in the church… that is, that most of […]

Never Enough Leaders

It seems that the leading cause of flagging small group ministries is the consistent lack of available small group leaders. Depending on the size of the church, we always recommend starting a new small group (or Sunday school class) between semi-annually and monthly. These new groups are necessary to accommodate new people who would […]

Antiques Roadshow in the Pulpit

I’ve been saying this for at least five years and now it appears I’ve been onto something. The day of the sermon as we know it is dead. Or at least, if you want to bother teaching and reaching the under-fifty crowd, it needs to be dead.

“A study by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman […]

You Reflect Yourself Better Than You Think

I’m in the final throes of writing a recommendation report for a congregation I did a consultation with. While making a recommendation for the church to better define their values, I got distracted by discussing the difference between one’s beliefs and one’s values. I’ve long said that beliefs drive values and values drive beliefs, […]

Small Church – Hope for the Future

This week I’ve been in the midst of a couple discussions about the small church.

It started when a colleague cited a statistic he’d read that 94 percent of churches in North America were small churches. I was tempted to reply that God must love small churches, since the Lord apparently created so many, but […]

Prayer for People Who Can’t Sit Still

My wife is a contemplative. I watch her pray and I have to wonder how she does it. Her eyes close, her face gets a serene, contended look on it, and she sits there. And sits there.

Get help with your “Can’t sit still” prayer life.

She doesn’t move.

She doesn’t speak.

She just sits there listening and […]

Christmas Ideas

It’s not too early to begin thinking about what you’re going to do to capitalize on the pagan holiday known as Christmas. Yes, you heard me correctly – Christmas is a pagan holiday. But contrary to what you might think, its status as a pagan holiday makes it an even more valuable evangelism tool than you […]

Why Most Church Consultations Don’t Make a Long-Term Difference

We at 21st Century Strategies have been doing church consultations for over twenty-three years and we’ve had the opportunity to study why some churches thrive after a consultant has done their job and why other churches fail. Conversations with other church consultants reveal a lot of the same data. Here’s the bottom line: for […]

Email: Friend or Foe

One of my most common ongoing battles with congregational leaders I work with is the effective use of emails/Facebook messages, etc. The age of less-is-more, microwaves, and 140-character communication hasn’t just arrived; it’s made itself at home in the church. And though it might be rather convenient, I’m seeing an alarming rise in misunderstandings […]