Jaylen Bledsoe, Chief Executive Business Officer at The Potter's House in Dallas, oversees the operations of a ministry with roughly 300 employees, 2,500 volunteers, a 7,000-seat room, and a Sunday stream that reaches 30,000 to 40,000 people. He joins James Forrest with a framework for the difference between running a business and running a church that every XP will recognize: in the marketplace, growth is a funnel you can buy your way down, but in ministry every dollar deployed on staff, marketing, or stage design is someone's seed. That single distinction shapes how he evaluates spending, and it sits underneath his broader charge to leaders at churches of any size — do what's right now, and build a culture of right, because a process that was fragmented at a thousand members doesn't get better at ten thousand. It gets inherited, and it gets worse.

Jaylen is direct about where he thinks the role is heading and what's standing in the way. He describes the pastoral micromanagement that leaves skilled staff running every idea past a donor with a business background, and predicts churches will increasingly hire experienced executives and give them real authority to own their lanes — at higher cost, but with better outcomes if senior leadership and boards can be patient. He names talent and leadership development as the central challenge, including the conflict no one wants to have when the person who's been on payroll for twenty years occupies the headcount you need for the skill set you don't have. The Potter's House works that problem through Leader Labs, staff chapels, and funded continuing education, with a recurring lesson drawn from Netflix and Blockbuster: specialists who only press one button aren't agile enough for a church that plans in one-week sprints.

The conversation covers his approach to technology. Anchor your core systems and review them on a cycle, experiment quietly with the ancillary tools for six months before anyone else hears about it, and keep an eye on subscription creep; along with a volunteer-to-contractor-to-hire path for leaders who don't consider themselves technical. He reframes his organization's "pivot trauma" around an Easter plan that changed thirty days out on a word his pastor received, arguing that core values hold while strategies stay subject to a move of God. He also names the thing he'd do differently: spending his first six months analyzing instead of building relationships with the staff. He closes with three instructions for every XP in the country: keep prayer ahead of you, operate in what's right, and create margin, because God didn't call you to sacrifice your life in order to give your life.

Dan Zimbardi, Executive Pastor at Sandals Church in Riverside, California, has helped lead a church that began with eight people in a living room to fourteen locations reaching 40,000 to 50,000 people each week through in-person and digital gatherings. Eleven of those fourteen came by merger, and Dan's counsel on church combinations is less about deal structure than posture: enter the conversation kingdom-minded enough to walk away, keep your word on the far side of the vote, and send the person with the right demeanor into the room. Honor has since become a cornerstone of how Sandals approaches every church it adopts.

The conversation turns to the relationship every XP navigates, and Dan is candid that his ability to challenge his senior pastor is a function of fifteen years of accrued trust rather than title. He describes the arrangement as 51/49, names the mistake of demanding influence six months into a role, and puts the harder question back on the listener: what do you need to adjust to earn it? He calls his approach "punch and hug," the deliberate pairing of directness with encouragement, and argues the starting point is knowing your own wiring well enough to know which one you owe the room. On hiring, he's equally direct; integrity and chemistry over talent, because the messes he's inherited all trace back to overlooking a lack of authenticity in someone who brought a lot to the table.

Dan also brings a technologist's read on where churches stand with AI: adoption is nearly universal among church staff, but almost no one has a plan, and the fix starts with alignment on policy and guidelines before a roadmap. He offers a pointed comparison from his years at Google; churches are notoriously slow to respond and short on urgency, and while some of that is the genuine work of waiting on the Lord, much of it is fear or inattention. He closes on sustainability with the habit he credits most: pushing ninety percent of his inbox back out through delegation, not to lighten his own load but to position the church to keep growing after he's gone. Plus a challenge to isolated XPs everywhere, an unapologetic pickleball habit, and what he'd tell the discouraged executive pastor driving home tonight.

Ken Fisher, Executive Pastor at Church of The Mill in South Carolina, spent 25 years in financial services and healthcare (CVS) before answering a call to ministry later in life. He joins James Forrest fresh to talk about leading one of the fastest-growing churches in America — from 1,200 in weekly attendance on a single campus in 2016 to roughly 6,000 across three campuses today.

Ken walks through what it's taken to scale: growing staff from under 20 to nearly 100, building a robust Biblical counseling ministry that now serves over 100 people a month, and making a deliberate, costly pivot to over-invest in next-gen ministry even when it meant lower per-family giving. He's candid about the tension between two types of executive pastors — lifelong vocational ministers and business-background transplants like himself — and where each tends to have blind spots, along with how AI is starting to show up as both a helpful tool and a stewardship question in ministry work.

The conversation turns personal as Ken reflects on the corporate-world "grind culture" he's had to unlearn, his church's decision to intentionally slow down every July to let staff recharge, and why he considers himself an "extroverted introvert" who recharges at a cabin in the North Carolina mountains. He closes with advice for the next generation of XPs: surround yourself with smart people, resist the urge to control everything, and remember that ministry growth isn't about chasing numbers — it's about executing well and letting God do the rest.