Pastors: The Remarkable Shepherds Behind T.D. Jakes, Tony Evans, Sheryl Brady and Wilfredo “Choco” De Jesús

Sheryl Brady

Pastor, The Potter's House of North Dallas — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · X

Sheryl Brady will tell you plainly where she started. “I was a 15-year-old high school dropout,” she told The Christian Post, “and life was very hard for me because of the lack of education and of jobs and finances.”

She had no Bible college and no theology school — “I wish I could say that I did that,” she admits — and she carried a deep sense of being unqualified. What she had was a voice. A friend invited her to hear Bishop T.D. Jakes preach, and watching him, she caught a glimpse of her own future.

Jakes, she says, made her aware of the gifts that were inside her life and became a key God used to unlock them. Born and raised in Detroit, she traveled the globe for more than 30 years as a pastor, lecturer and recording artist, speaking at MegaFest, Woman Thou Art Loosed and the Women of Faith tours.

Then Jakes commissioned her to pastor The Potter's House of North Dallas, a campus that launched its worship services just before Easter 2010. Under her leadership it grew from a few hundred congregants to a few thousand — a strong family church built by a woman who once believed she had nothing to offer.

"Believe [in God] for the impossible, the unimaginable, the unobtainable, and the incurable,"

Brady builds at home first. She has refused, in her own words, to sacrifice her children on the altar of the church; her three daughters and their husbands all work full time in ministry, and she calls building her family her greatest calling. She was the first and only female speaker ever at ManPower 2010, Jakes's men's conference.

Her books — You Have It In You! and Don't Miss the Moment: How God Uses the Insignificant to Create the Extraordinary — carry one thesis: God uses the people who feel insignificant.

And after her sister Kay died of cancer, she established Kay's Way grief and loss support groups, turning her own crisis of faith into a place where hundreds of others could heal.

The Christian Post — “Interview: How TD Jakes Helped Sheryl Brady Become a Pastor”
The Christian Post — “When I Wasn't on Speaking Terms with God”
Bill Winston Ministries — “Pastor Sheryl Brady”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sergio De La Mora  ·  Stephen Chandler

Sergio De La Mora

Founder, Cornerstone Church of San Diego (now Heart Revolution Church) — National City, CA

Official links: Website · X

Sergio De La Mora was the youngest of six children of Mexican immigrants, raised poor in Santa Barbara, California, in a family where, from the age of nine, every Saturday and every summer meant work.

His father, an immigrant from Guadalajara who built a business with no education and little English, taught him never to wait for anyone to do things for him. But the streets got their hooks in first.

His brothers started a gang; Sergio dressed as a gang member for school, then changed into skateboard gear — at twelve he had been the top skateboarder in his city. At fourteen he was stabbed in the back in a gang fight and nearly died. At fifteen he was a cocaine addict, smoking PCP, living violently.

Music pulled him partway out: he built a successful disc-jockey company, with hundreds of kids coming to his dances. Then, on the edge of signing a long contract, he had a dream he took as God's voice setting two paths before him — worldly success or ministry.

He sold his company, went into the streets of Santa Barbara preaching, and went on to found Cornerstone Church of San Diego, described as the largest Latino-led church in San Diego history, averaging about 4,000 people a week and named by Outreach magazine the third fastest-growing church in America in 2009.

"The day of the silent, isolated church is no longer relevant to the nation,"

De La Mora carried the same message into print and into the community. His book The Heart Revolution: Experience the Power of a Turned Heart gave its name to an annual conference and, eventually, to the church itself — Cornerstone renamed itself Heart Revolution Church in 2020.

He co-founded the Turning the Hearts Center, a nonprofit serving youth and families with food distribution, work readiness, gang prevention and parenting programs, and he served as president of the Hispanic Mega Church Association of the NHCLC/Conela, resourcing Latino megachurch pastors across the country.

In 2021 he handed the lead pastor role to TJ and Carissa Anglin — the boy from the gang passing the pulpit on, on his own terms.

Outreach Magazine — “Sergio De La Mora: Turning a Generation”
Church Executive — “NHCLC/Conela's Hispanic Mega Church Association Names President”
Wikipedia — “Heart Revolution Church”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sarah Jakes Roberts  ·  Sheryl Brady

Stephen Chandler

Senior Pastor, Union Church — Glen Burnie, MD

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Stephen Chandler learned ministry in his father's house. Ron Chandler pastored New Life International Fellowship while running a medical courier business, and Stephen, driving deliveries for the company at sixteen, had a vision of people in his suburban Baltimore community who did not know God had a purpose for their lives.

“I told God, ‘I want to help people know You and help them know the purpose for their lives,’” he recalls. He took over from his father and, with help from the Association of Related Churches, replanted the church as Destiny Church.

Launch day drew 331 people — and within ten weeks he had, by his own cheerful telling, shrunk it to 70. After a year Destiny reached 150; then it sat stuck at 350 for three years, in what one pastor called no-man's land: too big to be small, too small to be big.

Chandler even asked a larger church to adopt Destiny and take him onto its staff. They said no. He stayed, fixed his leadership team, and slowly Destiny grew to about 2,400. Then he did what most pastors fear: he merged.

His friend Jimmy Rollins wanted to devote himself to marriage ministry, so Destiny and Rollins's i5 City Church became one church — Union. Coming into 2023, Union averaged 3,800 people; within months it nearly doubled, and in January 2024 Sunday attendance topped 10,000 for the first time.

"Converts add to your church, but disciples multiply a church."

Union now meets in eight locations across Maryland and Virginia and in Charlotte, North Carolina, where its first out-of-state campus drew nearly 1,700 people to its first service.

Stephen leads with his wife, Zai — a phenomenal communicator, he says, who makes the house feel like a family — and their shared message is the one he heard as a teenager: know God, find freedom, discover purpose, make a difference.

His book Stop Waiting for Permission carries that same charge to other leaders, and Union's BLDERS conference trains pastors to build the leadership capacity their growth will demand. The pastor who once begged a bigger church to adopt him now teaches others how to stay.

ARC (Association of Related Churches) — “High Capacity: Union Church's Journey from Merger to Multisite Megachurch”
Union Church — “Visit Union”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sheryl Brady  ·  T.D. Jakes

T.D. Jakes

Founder & Longtime Senior Pastor, The Potter's House — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Thomas Dexter Jakes grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, known around the neighborhood as “Bible Boy” for carrying his Bible to school and preaching to an imaginary congregation. He learned work early.

His mother, Odith, a home economics teacher, taught her children to cook, sew and clean, and his father, Ernest, built a janitorial company from a mop and a bucket into a business with 42 employees. Young Thomas sold vegetables from the family garden, threw newspapers and sold Avon products door to door.

When his father lay dying of kidney disease, Jakes helped his mother tend him, mopping blood from the floor around the dialysis machine. In 1982, at twenty-five, he became pastor of a storefront church in West Virginia with ten members.

The congregation grew — to 300 by 1990, then on to Cross Lanes — and in 1995 he founded TDJ Enterprises, which publishes his books and produces his films. In 1996 he moved to Dallas and founded The Potter's House on a 34-acre hilltop campus with a 5,000-seat auditorium.

Time magazine put him on its cover and asked whether he was the next Billy Graham, and PBS named him among America's top ten religious leaders. The boy who preached to nobody was preaching to millions.

Jakes's ministry always traveled beyond the pulpit: the Woman Thou Art Loosed conferences, a broadcast ministry carried on The Potter's Touch, many bestselling books, and films produced through TDJ Enterprises, including Sparkle, Heaven Is for Real and Miracles from Heaven. He led the early-morning prayer service for President Barack Obama on inauguration day in 2009.

After a health emergency during a sermon, he announced in April 2025 that he was passing leadership of The Potter's House to his daughter Sarah Jakes Roberts and her husband, Touré Roberts — a founder handing a megachurch to the next generation of his own family.

The Digital Journalist — “The Face of Texas: Bishop T.D. Jakes”
Wikipedia — “T. D. Jakes”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Stephen Chandler  ·  Tim Ross

Tim Ross

Pastor, Embassy City Church; Host, The Basement with Tim Ross — Irving, TX

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram

Tim Ross's honesty starts where most people's stops. “I was molested when I was eight years old by a neighbour that lived across the street from me,” he says, “and I carried that pain into my teenage years. At the age of 12 I was exposed to pornography, and at 19, it was just controlling me.”

Born in Inglewood, California, he had gone to college to study administration of justice and become a law enforcement officer. Instead, the secret ran his life. At nineteen, his mother caught him looking at pornography — and instead of hiding, he told her everything: the abuse, the addiction, the root under the fruit.

That night the whole family began telling the truth, including abuse suffered by his little brother and by both of his parents. Six months later he gave his life to Jesus, and he started preaching in February 1996.

But freedom took a decade: three counsellors between the ages of twenty and thirty, and layers of low self-esteem, pride and insecurity peeled back through therapy and prayer. Through all of it, he never hid the road he was on — and that refusal to hide became his ministry.

"I found my identity in Christ,"

Ross pastored Embassy City Church in Irving, Texas, and his story is featured in I Am Second's film series, where his battle against the consequences of sexual abuse is told as a story that eventually leads to love.

He now occupies his time as a podcaster, bestselling author and preacher, hosting The Basement with Tim Ross — conversations built on the same radical vulnerability, about trauma, addiction and faith, for people who feel they do not fit in the church's penthouse.

His books, Upset the World and Welcome to the Basement, carry his upside-down message: greatness is found by going low, telling the truth, and letting other people watch you heal. The man who once lived a double life now makes his life's work out of having nothing hidden.

Salt 106.5 — “Abused as a Child, Addicted to Porn as an Adult, Restored by Therapy and Jesus: Pastor Tim Ross”
I Am Second — “The Stories of I Am Second”
Google Books — “Books by Tim Ross”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  T.D. Jakes  ·  Tony Evans

Tony Evans

Founder, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship; President, The Urban Alternative — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Anthony Tyrone Evans's national ministry began in a tiny seminary studio. In 1973 a Houston radio producer asked Dallas Theological Seminary for good preaching to air for free, and a professor recommended Evans, a 24-year-old student; he spent the next few years preaching faithfully into a microphone for a crowd he could not see.

Then he bet on the smallest of beginnings. In 1976 he founded Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas with ten people meeting in his home, and watched it grow past 10,000 congregants with more than 100 ministries. In 1982 he became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Dallas Theological Seminary.

With his wife, Lois, he built The Urban Alternative — formed in 1981 when requests for his sermons came in faster than Lois could fulfill the orders — into a broadcast heard on more than 1,400 radio outlets in more than 130 countries.

He holds the honor of writing and publishing the first full-Bible commentary and study Bible by an African American, has authored more than 150 books, booklets and Bible studies, and has served as chaplain of the Dallas Cowboys and, for more than three decades, of the Dallas Mavericks.

Evans served as Oak Cliff's senior pastor from 1976 to 2024, and he kept teaching through grief after Lois died in 2019. Baylor University named him one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.

Through the Tony Evans Training Center, he provides seminary-style biblical education online to leaders who cannot attend a seminary, and his family carries the work forward — among them his daughter Priscilla Shirer, a bestselling author and speaker, and his son Jonathan, once an NFL fullback and now chaplain of the Dallas Cowboys.

Ten people in a living room became a classroom for millions.

LIFE Today — “Dr. Tony Evans”
Wikipedia — “Tony Evans (pastor)”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tim Ross  ·  Travis Greene

Travis Greene

Co-founder & Senior Pastor, Forward City Church; Gospel Artist — Columbia, SC

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Travis Greene was pronounced dead twice before he started kindergarten. He was born stillborn and resuscitated, his mother Charleather has said, after his parents prayed over a baby whose skin was purple and who was not breathing. At four, living in Germany, he fell four stories out of a window.

Rescuers covered him with a white sheet and doctors pronounced him dead — until his mother picked up his lifeless body and prayed him back. Then, in 1989, when Travis was about five, his father died of an aneurysm, and his mother raised him on her own. Music became his escape from tragedy.

He turned to the keyboard instead of the streets, honed his gift travelling with his minister mother, and worked as a youth pastor and worship director. The breakthrough came with The Hill in 2015, which topped the Billboard gospel albums chart.

Its songs “Intentional” and “Made a Way” both reached No. 1, with “Made a Way” holding the top spot on the Hot Gospel Songs chart for 13 weeks. Greene has earned five Grammy nominations and took home seven Stellar Gospel Music Awards in 2017 — a living miracle, singing about the way through.

"God really had to deliver me from finding value in things, affirmation, pleasing people, and even with being impressed with people or wanting them to be impressed with me."

Greene and his wife, Dr. Jackie Greene, started Forward City Church in Columbia, South Carolina, and the church grew to include more than a thousand worshippers each week. Determined not to be selfish with what happens in worship there, they set out to capture it and put it out for the world to hear.

Kirk Franklin has called Greene one of the artists who are the future of gospel music — and Greene keeps pointing that future back to God and family, insisting that everything else is secondary.

BlackDoctor — “Gospel Singer Travis Greene, Pronounced Dead At 4-Years-Old, Is A Living Miracle!”
Wikipedia — “Travis Greene”
Music Gateway / AllMusic — “Travis Greene”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tony Evans  ·  Vaughn McLaughlin

Vaughn McLaughlin

Founder & Senior Pastor, The Potter's House International Ministries — Jacksonville, FL

Official links: Website

Vaughn McLaughlin tells his own conversion story without varnish. In a Sunday sermon he confessed that God saved him with a glass of Jack Daniels in one hand and a joint in the other — a man he describes as an alcoholic, cocaine-snorting sinner before he surrendered his life to Christ at 25 and felt called to preach at 26.

An athletic scholar turned college dropout, he went on to earn a master's and a doctorate in theology, and in 1988 he founded the ministry that became The Potter's House in Jacksonville. Then he did something few pastors attempt: he bought a dead mall.

In 2002 the church acquired the abandoned Normandy Mall for $4 million and invested $7.5 million in renovations, building Kingdom Plaza — reported to be valued at $40 million — on more than 48 acres. A former Sam's Wholesale Club became a 4,000-seat sanctuary.

Around it the church runs businesses it owns: The Potter's House Soul Food Bistro, the 22-lane King Pins Bowling Center and the Temple Builders Fitness Center, alongside a Christian academy a mile away. Broken people, broken places — McLaughlin's whole ministry says both can be rebuilt.

"Many go to the suburbs to escape the blight, but we decided to do something about the blight instead,"

Economic empowerment is the sermon made visible. Christianity Today described a congregation of 3,000, a Christian academy, a mini-mall of church- and member-run shops, and an incubator that helps fledgling entrepreneurs start businesses — teaching skills and providing space rent-free to get them started, while insisting hard work is part of the cost.

The church's teams have worked in prisons, food and clothing drives and street outreach. As McLaughlin puts it, the church should be involved in the economic development of its community, so people can become their own bosses and support themselves.

Penny Dickerson — “Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin: Agent of Change”
Christianity Today — “Wizard of Odds”
The Potter's House — “Our Bishop”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Travis Greene  ·  Victor Torres

Victor Torres

Founder, New Life Outreach International Church & New Life for Youth — Richmond, VA

Official links: Website · Facebook

Victor Torres was 12 years old the first time he stabbed a man. His family had moved from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn in the early 1960s, and the neighbourhood was rough — he had to fight his way in and out of school every day. By 14 he was heavily addicted to heroin.

By 18 he was one of New York City's most feared gang leaders and had been incarcerated three times. Teachers told his mother he would die in the electric chair, and told her to give up on him. She never did.

Night after night she prayed for her son, sometimes from a small closet he would hear at 3 a.m. His mother found faith, brought it into the home, and steered him toward a faith-based rehabilitation centre started by David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge.

There, quitting heroin cold turkey with only prayer and the Bible, Torres fell to his knees on the third day, crying out for the strength to change — and got up, he says, with the power to overcome the addiction.

The boy the teachers wrote off became an evangelist, an author, and the subject of the award-winning feature film Victor, based on his autobiography Son of Evil Street.

"My story is proof that no matter what the circumstances are, no matter how you feel or how negative it looks, redemption is possible,"

In 1971, Torres and his wife, Carmen, opened New Life for Youth in Richmond, Virginia, as a place to help teens beat addiction. Over the decades that followed, they helped more than 20,000 young men and women overcome addiction, and opened recovery homes including The Men's Ranch, Mercy House and Mercy Mom's House.

Torres also founded and pastors New Life Outreach International Church in Richmond. His message to parents of children struggling with addiction is simple, and it comes from his own mother: never give up.

Gospel Herald — “Gang Leader Turned Pastor Shares How 'Encounter With God' Changed His Life”
Today's Christian Entertainment — “Award-Winning Biopic VICTOR Now Available on Netflix”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Vaughn McLaughlin  ·  Wilfredo "Choco" De Jesús

Wilfredo "Choco" De Jesús

U.S. Missions Executive Director, Assemblies of God; Former Lead Pastor, New Life Covenant Church — Chicago, IL

Official links: Website · X

Wilfredo De Jesús — “Choco,” short for chocolate — grew up in a dysfunctional Puerto Rican family in Chicago's Humboldt Park. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when he was 8. His brother led one of Chicago's most dangerous gangs, and the park near his home was considered one of the most violent in the nation at the time.

At 14, he applied for a city summer job to help his mother make ends meet, expecting to clean streets. Instead he was assigned to a small neighbourhood church, New Life Covenant, to help with the children's day camp. Twenty years later, he became senior pastor of that same church.

As lead pastor from 2000 to 2019, he led New Life Covenant as it grew to 17,000 adherents globally, through campuses, church plants and more than 75 ministries reaching the poor, the homeless, drug addicts and gang members — the very people his own story began among.

In 2013, TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and dubbed him the face of the Hispanic church reformation in America.

"You can be poor and on welfare, have a dysfunctional family, be abandoned and fatherless, and yet get your education and be covered by one of the biggest magazines in the world."

De Jesús went on to serve as general treasurer of the Assemblies of God from 2019 to 2024, and was appointed U.S. Missions Executive Director in April 2024 — the first Latino to serve on the denomination's Executive Leadership Team, according to the Assemblies of God.

He is the author of Amazing Faith, In the Gap, Stay the Course, Move into More and Love Them Anyway. The kid assigned to clean streets by a church day camp now leads missions across the country, still standing, as he puts it, in the gap for the disenfranchised.

The Christian Post — “Wilfredo 'Choco' De Jesus: From Inner City Chicago Kid to Influential Leader of the Hispanic Evangelical Movement in the US”
Assemblies of God — “U.S. Missions Executive Director”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Victor Torres  ·  A.R. Bernard