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.