Dr. Warren Bird’s most popular research includes these free downloads:

Observing. Interpreting. Partnering. Encouraging.

During my fourth year as a pastor, I was asked to take training materials from a leading church consultant and develop them into a book. That experience became a major turning point in my life. The book, Carl George’s Prepare Your Church for the Future, which sold over 100,000 copies, showed me a powerful way to multiply someone’s influence. It taught me the importance of partnering my gifts with someone else’s gifts to expand their impact even further. Writing the book also helped me personally, giving me new ways of envisioning how God is working through various church leaders today.

Since that turning point, I have been blessed to come alongside the leaders of many spiritually passionate, healthy, innovative and growing churches across the country. Observing God’s work in and through those ministries has energized me to help maximize their influence and impact. Though research and personal involvement, I strive to identify the principles at work within effective ministries, and then to share those insights, spiritual breakthroughs and relevant ideas with other church leaders through multiplication tools that include books, resources, conferences, blogs, tweets, and other kinds of interaction.

A More Formal Summary of My Journey…

Warren Bird, Ph.D., researches cutting-edge churches and works with their leaders to multiply their evangelistic and disciplemaking impact. He is widely recognized as among the nation’s leading students, researchers and writers about megachurches. As @lensweet tweeted, “No one knows more about megachurches than @warrenbird.”

He has authored or co-authored over 30 books, receiving several awards along the way. For example, he received the prestigious Gold Medallion Award, the top honor given by the international trade association for Christian publishers. He has also contributed collaborative chapters or sections to 7 other books. He has published almost 200 magazine articles and more than 30 major research reports. He has served on advisory boards for several magazines and several other book projects.

An ordained minister, he served on staff for 11 years at Princeton (N.J.) Alliance Church, an innovative church with a worship attendance approaching 2,000. Other pastoral experience includes leading a C&MA church-planting team for four years. He has also served as a long-time regularly contributing faculty member at Alliance Theological Seminary, teaching in the D. Min Program.

Warren Bird’s Ph.D. is from Fordham University in sociology of religion. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Wheaton Graduate School, Wheaton, Ill. (B.A., M.A.) and Alliance Theological Seminary, Nyack, N.Y. (M.Div.). He is licensed under The Christian and Missionary Alliance Metropolitan District.

In his early years of ministry , Warren Bird served on Carl George’s senior management team of the Pasadena-based Charles E. Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth. His responsibilities included visiting, interviewing, researching, and profiling many of the largest, fastest-growing, or newest churches in North America. In subsequent years, he did similar research and development for the Canadian-based International Leadership Centre – Willow Creek Canada and for the Asbury Theological Seminary-based Beeson Institute for Advanced Church Leadership.

More recently he served as Research Director at Leadership Network, North America’s leading organization to help entrepreneurial church leaders in growing churches move from ideas to implementation to increased influence and impact.

Today he is Vice President of Research and Equipping at the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit accrediting agency designed to enhance trust and certify integrity in Christ-centered churches and ministries.

Warren and his college sweetheart Michelle have two grown children and they live in a suburb of New York City.