Grace Outrageous Ministry’s mission is to creatively and boldly take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all people. Founder and director of GO is Pastor Tress Reed. This self described “redeemed hot mess” has a passion to reach the unchurched by taking Jesus to the streets.
Tress is a woman with a deep love, conviction, and faith in the power of God as expressed through the indwelling of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. She is a wife, momma, Grammie, family counselor, pastor, chaplain, speaker and aspiring author. Following an eighteen year career in business management, she returned to school and received her Master’s in Family Ministry at Winebrenner Theological Seminary, Findlay, Ohio. In addition to leading GO, Tress is a chaplain at The Ohio State University while also attending school there. As a new season of life has recently unfolded, Tress has continued to learn and reach out in social justice areas such as racial justice and LGBTQ equality. She volunteers in many ways including serving at the Institute of Formational Prayer in Ashland, Ohio and as a board member on several local non-profit agencies.
An internal processing introvert, Tress finds it amusing that God has graced her with the ability to speak publicly with boldness and love. She has an immensely deep love for her children, grandchildren, family, friends, and whomever else God brings across her path. Tress is also an avid reader and continuously pursues learning opportunities. In her down time, she can be found in her kitchen cooking some crazy healthy ethnic food, curled up with her nose in a book, heading out for a run, or taking a walk with her dog. Most recently she has begun outlining a future autobiographical book.
The journey of Tress’s life has been a painful, yet amazing, living testimony of Grace Outrageous lived out. The Holy Spirit has led her down the road of healing from childhood abuses, family substance addictions, divorce, deep betrayals, her own poor choices, and a decade’s long battle of “not being good enough and being thrown away”.
While she used to be ashamed of feeling like a square peg in a round world, she now embraces her “square peg-ness” and has found many fellow square-peg servants!
Tress’s vision for those engaged with Grace Outrageous Ministry has evolved out of her own life experiences and her deep desire to bring Jesus’ all encompassing love to those whose paths we cross… be that the struggling single mom at the local grocery story… or the hungry children of an African village.