Scott Gress

What? Do you really want to fire a volunteer? There are times when someone is so troubling in their role that you wish they weren’t in that position of responsibility. It may be just an annoyance or it may be

What Rocks Come Next (After getting the Gospel right)? After getting the “Big Rocks” of the gospel into the jar (in the illustration of trying to get rocks, stones, pebbles, sand and water into the jar) then you go for

Shaping the culture means putting in the big rocks first. Big rocks? Yeah, you remember the illustration. How do you get all these rocks and pebbles and sand and water in the jar at one time? You put in the

Shaping culture requires checking the homework. When you were a child you no doubt had school homework. Homework. The word itself can raise your blood pressure. Who wants homework? No one! But why do teachers assign homework anyway? The lesson

Assimilation? Assimilation to what? Assimilation by whom? New members to the church or the other way around? At a time when many churches get very few visitors and even fewer new members it is a wonderful thing to celebrate if

Shaping culture can be undermined by the unintended consequences of our behavior. Think about the aspiration to make disciples. Sometimes we hear ourselves express it this way: “We need more leaders.” Or in frustration we say, “no one wants to

My father had a lot of sayings that he repeated to my sister and me. One he repeatedly said was, “anything worth doing is worth doing well.” I got the “Gress culture” through his stories and sayings. What stories and sayings

If the real issue is the culture of the congregation, then how does one embed new culture or change the existing culture in an organization like the church? Well, how do you raise children? How do you “embed” in them