Tim Ross (born c. 1975, Inglewood, California) is an American pastor, podcaster, bestselling author, and social media influencer.
He spent nearly 14 years at T.D. Jakes’ The Potter’s House in Dallas before serving as a pastor at Gateway Church and later founding Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas, in 2015.
In 2022, he handed Embassy City off to a successor pastor and shifted his full-time focus to podcasting, speaking, and church consulting.
His podcast, The Basement with Tim Ross, has surpassed 300,000 subscribers and 25 million views. His book Welcome to the Basement, a revised edition of his earlier Upset the World, is a national bestseller.
He is widely considered one of the most distinctive communicators working in evangelical Christianity today.
Tim Ross At a Glance
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Tim Ross |
| Born | c. 1975, Inglewood, California, USA |
| Age | Approximately 50 (as of 2026) |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Juliette Ross (m. May 1, 1999) |
| Children | Nathan Ross; Noah Ross |
| Ministry | |
| Formerly | The Potter’s House, Dallas (1997-2010); Gateway Church, Southlake (2011-2015); Embassy City Church, Irving (2015-2022) |
| Current role | Global Christian Advisor; Podcaster; Author; Speaker |
| Church founded | Embassy City Church, Irving, Texas (2015; handed off 2022) |
| Website | timross.org |
| Career | |
| Books | Upset the World (2020); Welcome to the Basement (2024, revised) |
| Podcasts | The Basement with Tim Ross; Wide Open |
| Technology | B-Side (app and technology company, launched 2023) |
| Net worth | Not publicly disclosed |
Early Life and Background
Tim Ross was born in Inglewood, California, a city on the southwestern edge of Los Angeles. He has spoken publicly about a childhood marked by family church attendance alongside real personal struggle.
Despite growing up in a Christian household where his parents were regular churchgoers, Ross has shared openly that he did not experience a genuine personal faith until his early twenties.
He has described himself as someone who knew religion before he knew Jesus, showing up to services while quietly dealing with things no one around him knew about.
Ross has spoken in testimonies about being molested by a neighbor as a young child, an experience he kept hidden for years.
He has credited breaking that silence, eventually, with freeing not just himself but others in his family who had carried similar secrets.
His willingness to talk about childhood trauma from a church platform became one of the defining features of his ministry style, he is not the pastor who pretends a clean upbringing led to a clean faith. The messier version of his story is the one he tells.
He went to college to study administration of justice, aiming to become a law enforcement officer, specifically a homicide detective.
He has described the criminal justice mindset — build the case sequentially, don’t prosecute on circumstantial evidence, follow the facts, as one that still shapes how he approaches questions of faith and doubt.
That background shows up constantly in how he handles complex theological or cultural conversations: he investigates before he comments.
Conversion and the Start of Ministry
Tim Ross gave his life to Christ on January 14, 1996. He was 21 years old and had walked into a church service as part of his usual routine, not expecting anything unusual to happen.
What he describes instead is a moment where he felt genuinely found out, where a Scripture he was reading stopped being about someone else and became uncomfortably personal.
He left that service converted, and 41 days later, on February 25, 1996, he preached his first sermon.
That 41-day gap between conversion and first sermon is not a typo. Ross has referenced it in multiple interviews and book contexts as a marker of how quickly and unexpectedly the calling arrived.
He wasn’t groomed for ministry, trained for a pulpit, or handed an opportunity by a well-connected family member. He simply started, and kept going.
In June 1997, he moved to Dallas, Texas, and walked into The Potter’s House, T.D. Jakes’ church, already one of the most prominent Black megachurches in the country at the time.
Ross has described that decision as Spirit-led rather than strategic. He wasn’t chasing a platform. He stayed for nearly 14 years.
The Potter’s House Years (1997-2010)
Ross served at The Potter’s House for approximately 13 and a half years, working his way through several ministry roles.
He began as a youth evangelist, then served as young adult pastor for his final four years at the church. He has credited this season of ministry as foundational to everything that followed, calling T.D. Jakes one of the people most responsible for shaping who he became as a communicator and leader.
By 2010, he was well-known enough within Dallas ministry circles that his departure from The Potter’s House was noted publicly.
He left on his own terms, stepping away with a clear sense that his season there was complete, and with a reputation as one of the sharper preaching voices in the city.
It was also at The Potter’s House that Tim and Juliette first met they were both involved in youth ministry there, before their wedding on May 1, 1999, while he was still serving at the church.
Gateway Church (2011-2015)
After leaving The Potter’s House in 2010, Tim Ross joined Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, as a pastor.
Gateway, founded by Robert Morris, was one of the fastest-growing megachurches in America at the time, with a large multisite operation and a significant national ministry profile.
Ross served there from 2011 through 2015, adding Gateway’s culture of leadership development and multiethnic outreach to the formation he had already received at The Potter’s House.
The combination of those two institutions, one rooted in Black church tradition, the other in white evangelical megachurch culture, is not incidental to who Tim Ross became as a minister.
He has spoken about the experience of code-switching as a pastor, the pressure to present differently depending on which audience is in front of you, and why he thinks that pressure can quietly hollow out a communicator over time.
Those conversations shaped his decision, eventually, to step out of institutional church life entirely and build something on his own terms.
Embassy City Church (2015-2022)
In 2015, Tim and Juliette Ross founded Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas. The church’s identity was built around being genuinely multiethnic and multigenerational, not as a marketing slogan, but as a structural commitment.
Ross has described it as trying to build the kind of church that actually looked like what heaven is supposed to look like, with people from different backgrounds sharing the same seats and the same table.
Embassy City grew rapidly. Within a few years it had reached megachurch scale, drawing thousands of weekly attendees and establishing a strong regional presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The church partnered with a network of other ministries, including Transformation Church in Tulsa, where pastor Michael Todd was building a similarly diverse, culturally engaged congregation.
In October 2022, Ross made the decision to step away from the lead pastor role. He and Juliette named Tim Rivers, a pastor they had personally mentored for more than three years, as Embassy City’s new lead pastor.
The Rosses announced they would remain members of the church and continue an advisory relationship with the congregation, but their primary work was shifting to a new chapter entirely: global Christian advisory work, podcasting, and media.
The Basement Podcast and Media Work
The Basement with Tim Ross launched in 2022 and grew faster than almost anyone expected. Within roughly two years, it had surpassed 300,000 subscribers and 25 million total views.
The show’s concept is deliberately broad: it isn’t a sermon series, a devotional, or a theology lecture. Ross describes it as a space for real conversations about real issues, relationships, money, faith, culture, race, deconstruction, grief, failure, from a lens of faith that doesn’t require the listener to already be a committed Christian to stay in the room.
The name is drawn from the same idea that became his book: in a culture that chases the penthouse, the top floor, the highest visibility and the biggest platform, Jesus consistently operated from the lowest position.
The basement is where the actual kingdom work gets done. That inversion of the usual success framework runs through everything Ross does publicly.
The show has featured interviews with pastors, athletes, musicians, and cultural figures. Ross has described it as one of the most listened-to Christian podcasts among people who wouldn’t describe themselves as Christians, which he considers a specific kind of success that metrics don’t fully capture.
He also co-hosts a second podcast called Wide Open, expanding his media footprint further. In 2023, he launched B-Side, a technology company that includes the B-Side app, designed to host entertaining and culturally relevant content delivered through a faith lens.
His official bio notes future plans to produce short films and venture into stand-up comedy.
Books and Publications
Ross’s first book, Upset the World, was published in 2020 through Gateway Press. The title came from Acts 17:6, where early Christians were accused by Roman authorities of having “upset the world” — a description Ross reframed as a compliment rather than a charge.
The book argued that ordinary Christians, living with genuine love and intentionality, have the capacity to disrupt systems and communities that need disrupting.
In 2024, he published Welcome to the Basement: An Upside-Down Guide to Greatness, a substantially revised and rewritten version of the earlier book updated for the current cultural moment.
The new edition carries a foreword from Michael Todd, the senior pastor of Transformation Church, and builds on the basement metaphor that has since become central to Ross’s public identity.
The book became a national bestseller, and he toured with it through church events and bookshops in early 2024.
Personal Life
Tim and Juliette Ross have been married since May 1, 1999. They met at The Potter’s House while both serving in youth ministry and have built their public ministry as a genuine partnership.
Juliette is listed as a business partner in their for-profit entity, Upset the World LLC, and co-leads their marriage ministry and coaching work alongside Tim.
They have two sons, Nathan and Noah, who have grown up inside the rhythms of pastoral and public ministry life. Ross has spoken about fatherhood in the same candid register he brings to everything else: it’s not a side feature of his faith story, it’s one of the central things he is trying to get right.
The family lives in Texas, where Ross has been based since moving to Dallas in 1997. He no longer leads a local congregation but continues to speak nationally and internationally while building his media and advisory work from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Theology and Ministry Philosophy
Ross operates within a broadly evangelical, charismatic framework shaped by his years at The Potter’s House and Gateway Church. His preaching is gospel-centered, grace-forward, and relentlessly accessible.
He uses humor as a primary tool, not as decoration. His comedic instincts are sharp enough that he has publicly discussed plans to try stand-up comedy, and audiences who have seen him preach would not be surprised.
He has spoken about his discomfort with “Jell-O churches”, congregations that promise constant celebration and no standards — and contrasted them with communities willing to hold people accountable through genuine love.
He is straightforwardly traditional on questions like marriage (between a man and a woman) and abortion (opposed), which surprises some listeners who assume his cultural fluency means theological progressivism.
His approach to deconstruction is more nuanced than either full embrace or flat rejection. He has said publicly that he welcomes people tearing down their “Lego churches”, the institutional faith that was handed to them without real personal grounding, because only after that kind of honest reckoning can real faith be built.
The Basement podcast explicitly targets deconstructors and agnostics, and Ross has described getting messages from atheists who say the show is the only faith-adjacent content they can tolerate, which he considers a specific ministry victory.
Criticism and Controversies
Ross has attracted criticism from discernment ministry circles on several occasions.
The most theologically significant came in 2023 when, in a conversation with YouTuber Ruslan KD, Ross said that belief in the Trinity was a “non-essential” issue and that he would still “rock with” people who held modalist views (the belief that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three distinct persons but three modes or manifestations of one God).
The comment drew sharp pushback from orthodox evangelical voices, who pointed out that Trinitarian theology is one of the most ancient and universal markers of historic Christian orthodoxy, not a secondary conviction.
Ross did not issue a formal theological retraction, and the statement remains a point of criticism in discernment circles.
Earlier controversy surrounded a clip from a conference where a woman danced on Ross while he was on stage, with critics characterizing it as sexual dancing and arguing it was inappropriate conduct for a pastor in a ministry setting.
Ross addressed the incident directly, pushing back on the characterization of what happened.
A separate, widely circulated statement, “Jesus is the only stripper we reverence”, was used by Ross as a rhetorical device in a sermon about worth and dignity.
The line divided audiences predictably: some found it a sharp, effective communication of a real theological point; others found it an example of a broader pattern of using shock-value language as a substitute for theological substance.
His connection to T.D. Jakes, whose own Trinitarian orthodoxy has been disputed by evangelical scholars for decades, also surfaces regularly in discussions of Ross’s theological accountability.
Ross has been consistent in his praise for Jakes as a mentor and in his willingness to hold open questions about Jakes’ theology without treating them as disqualifying.
Net Worth and Financial Information
Tim Ross’s net worth has not been publicly disclosed, and no credible sourced figure exists. His income comes from speaking fees, book royalties through his publishing deals, his podcast and media platforms, the B-Side technology company, and church advisory consulting through Upset the World LLC.
Because Embassy City Church’s detailed financials were not widely publicized during his tenure and he is no longer leading a congregation, there is no current public financial disclosure available.
Interesting Facts
- Ross originally planned to become a homicide detective and studied administration of justice in college before his January 1996 conversion changed his direction entirely.
- He preached his first sermon just 41 days after becoming a Christian, on February 25, 1996.
- He spent nearly 14 years at The Potter’s House, mentored under T.D. Jakes, before leaving in 2010.
- He and Juliette met at The Potter’s House youth ministry before their 1999 wedding.
- The Basement podcast grew to over 300,000 subscribers and 25 million views within roughly two years of launch.
- His official bio mentions plans to enter stand-up comedy and produce short films, alongside the book and podcast work already underway.
- He launched B-Side, a technology company with its own app, in 2023, making him one of the few pastors-turned-podcasters who has moved into the tech space as well.
Timeline of Key Life Events
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 1975 | Born in Inglewood, California |
| January 14, 1996 | Gives his life to Christ at age 21 |
| February 25, 1996 | Preaches his first sermon, 41 days after conversion |
| June 1997 | Moves to Dallas, Texas; joins The Potter’s House ministry |
| May 1, 1999 | Marries Juliette Ross |
| 2010 | Leaves The Potter’s House after nearly 14 years |
| 2011 | Joins Gateway Church, Southlake, Texas, as a pastor |
| 2015 | Founds Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas |
| 2020 | Publishes Upset the World (Gateway Press) |
| October 2022 | Steps down as lead pastor of Embassy City; names Tim Rivers as successor; launches The Basement podcast |
| 2023 | Launches B-Side technology company and app; Trinity controversy |
| 2024 | Publishes Welcome to the Basement (revised bestseller); tours nationally |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Tim Ross a pastor?
Tim Ross was a pastor for more than 25 years, most recently as the founder and lead pastor of Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas. In October 2022, he stepped down from that role and handed the church to a successor. He now identifies primarily as a podcaster, global Christian advisor, speaker, and author, though he continues to preach at churches and conferences worldwide.
What does Tim Ross do now?
As of 2026, Tim Ross hosts The Basement with Tim Ross podcast and the Wide Open podcast, runs B-Side (a faith-based technology company), speaks at churches and corporate events globally, and works as a Christian advisor consulting with ministries including Transformation Church, Gateway Church, and others. He and Juliette also run marriage ministry and coaching through Upset the World LLC.
Who is Tim Ross’s wife?
Tim Ross is married to Juliette Ross. They met at The Potter’s House in Dallas while both serving in youth ministry and married on May 1, 1999. Juliette is his business partner in Upset the World LLC and co-leads their marriage ministry and coaching work. They have two sons, Nathan and Noah.
What church does Tim Ross pastor?
Tim Ross no longer leads a local church. He founded Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas, in 2015 and led it until October 2022, when he installed Tim Rivers as the new lead pastor. Before Embassy City, he served at The Potter’s House in Dallas (1997-2010) and Gateway Church in Southlake (2011-2015).
What is The Basement with Tim Ross?
The Basement with Tim Ross is a weekly podcast launched in 2022 that covers faith, relationships, culture, finances, race, deconstruction, and more through conversations with diverse guests. It has surpassed 300,000 subscribers and 25 million total views and is particularly known for reaching audiences outside traditional church circles, including agnostics and people in the process of deconstructing their faith.
What books has Tim Ross written?
Tim Ross wrote Upset the World (Gateway Press, 2020) and its substantially revised and rewritten successor, Welcome to the Basement: An Upside-Down Guide to Greatness (2024), which became a national bestseller. Both books build on the theme of the first-shall-be-last, least-shall-be-greatest principles Jesus taught, arguing that humility, service, and downward mobility are the actual path to meaningful impact.
What is Tim Ross’s net worth?
Tim Ross’s net worth has not been publicly disclosed. Published estimates online are unverified speculation. His income comes from speaking fees, book royalties, podcast revenue, the B-Side technology company, and his church consulting and advisory work through Upset the World LLC.
