The conference year, carried.
An annual conference runs on a calendar of decisions it must be able to defend: appointments in the spring, charge conferences in the fall, a session in June, and the hard cases whenever they come. Each has the same shape — many facts, real rules, and a roomful of people who must own the outcome. This page walks that calendar and shows, piece by piece, what a conference could stop doing by hand.
One posture holds throughout: the tool eats the schlep; the people decide. Nothing here scores a person, and nothing here hands down a recommendation. The numbers above are real — twenty-five years of one annual conference’s own statistics and the full text of the church’s law, already parsed and cross-linked. And two promises hold the whole page together. The simulator below is fictional forever — it has never scored a real person and never will. And a conference’s data lives only in that conference’s own instance, tiered to mirror its own confidentiality structure: what the cabinet may see, staff may not; what staff may see, the public may not. The same walls you already keep, kept by the software.
Appointment season
Second week of March. A legal pad, the parsonage list, the minimum-compensation schedule, and forty churches — and before a single appointment can be weighed, someone is cross-referencing by hand who is even eligible. Three weeks of spring go to the work before the work.
Below is that season, made playable. You sit as the cabinet: read the spring’s contingencies, open the board, and fill the charges. Toggle a constraint — require Spanish, only what a charge can pay, right-sized leadership — and every candidate list re-ranks at once. That weighing of many facts against real rules is the whole job; here it takes a second instead of an afternoon.
And this is no longer only a game. On one conference’s real records, a scouting report already exists for every charge — twenty-five years of its own statistics distilled to the page a cabinet actually reads — and, kept behind the conference’s own gate, an expected-professions baseline for weighing what a charge tends to produce, validated against a quarter century of appointments. The fictional board you can play here and those real instruments run on the same engine.
You are the appointive cabinet for a conference of 16 churches. Each spring brings retirements, requests, and arrivals. You fill the open charges — and the way you match clergy to churches shapes whether congregations grow or fade. Do it well for years and the conference flourishes; misjudge it and the vacancies and friction compound.
Worship attendance sets what a charge needs; apportionment payment is the second signal. Small charges lean on local pastors — yoke them into circuits when pastors run short. Larger churches need associates, the natural home for deacons.
Eligibility, compensation floors, and language needs cross-referenced by hand across forty open charges.
The board holds the rules; the cabinet holds the discernment. March is spent on people, not spreadsheets.
Everyone here is invented, so the process can be shown without judging anyone real. On a conference’s own data, the person-side stays purely factual — status, language, years, willingness to move. Never a score.
Charge conference
October. A district superintendent with sixty churches owes each one a packet: the membership report, the compensation form checked against the minimum schedule, the lay-leadership slate, the parsonage report, the agenda the Discipline requires. It is a month of evenings, and none of it is the meeting — it is the paperwork before the meeting.
Every figure in those packets already exists in the conference’s own records. Pick a church below and watch its packet assemble: rolls summarized, compensation pre-checked against the minimum, the slate carried forward, and anything that needs a human decision flagged in red rather than buried on page six.
From one conference’s 2024 reports alone, forty-five membership-roll anomalies surfaced automatically — corrections running as high as four-fifths of a roll. Those are exactly the lines a charge conference is supposed to catch, and almost never does by hand.
Four fictional churches, in the game’s register. Choose one and its packet assembles from the records — nothing below is typed by anyone.
Packets typed church by church; anomalies found two years later, if ever.
Packets assembled from the records in seconds; the superintendent reads exceptions, not spreadsheets.
And the data that flows up in the fall is the same data the spring board runs on. One body of work, twice a year.
The charge conference stays the charge conference — same authority, same vote, same minutes. It simply stops costing a month of evenings to convene well.
Vitality & the hard cases
The hardest meeting in conference life is the one about a church that is failing — and it usually happens two years after the moment something could have been done. Not for lack of care. The signal was sitting in the statistical tables all along; nobody’s job was to read four hundred of them.
A closure-risk score for every congregation — built from twenty-five years of its own reports, refreshed each fall, with the contributing factors named in plain English. The score belongs to a church, never to a person, and it triggers a conversation, never a conclusion. When a closure or merger does come, the same tool holds the procedure: the required consents, the notice periods, the trust-clause steps, each with the paragraph and the case law one tap away.
This engine is not a sketch. It runs today on one conference’s real statistics: risk scores for 481 congregations, five-year projections, and peer cohorts for honest comparison — with more than forty congregations currently flagged elevated or high.
Decline noticed at the third bad charge conference; closures improvised against a paragraph nobody has read twice.
The watch list arrives before the crisis; the procedure arrives with citations attached.
Early warning is a pastoral act. The point of seeing two years sooner is that two years is enough time to try something.
Conference property
Every conference owns buildings nobody meets in anymore: the church closed five years ago, the parsonage between uses, the camp it can barely insure. Each one sits somewhere specific, in a market doing something specific — and mostly they sit unexamined, mowed and locked, while the question of what they are for waits on a trustees’ meeting with better information.
Hold the whole portfolio in one view: every parcel held in trust, mapped, with its reported land-and-buildings value beside what the surrounding market has done since. Then make the question explicit — replant, hold, partner, sell — scored as an open equation for each parcel, the way the planting board scores a corridor. A closed church on a growth corridor is not the same object as a closed church on a shrinking county road; today they are filed in the same drawer.
The first model has now run, on one conference’s real books: a charge-viability index that holds pastoral cost against operating income for every active charge. It put the true cost of a full-time pastorate — salary, housing, benefits — at roughly $87,500 a year, and found that only 29 percent of active charges can sustainably carry it. That is the arithmetic the replant–hold–partner–sell question has been waiting for, and it names, years early, the buildings this ledger will one day hold. The rest of the groundwork already exists in the data spine: land-and-buildings value is one of the 218 measures every congregation reports each year, every closed and merged church’s location is already on the map, and the census joins that power the planting scores work on parcels too.
| parcel | replant | hold | partner | sell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Former Bethel — closed 20212.1 acres, 9,400 sq ft sanctuary · area median home value +41% in five years · nearest congregation 6 mi | 78 | 41 | 64 | 55 |
| Camp tract — 38 acrescarrying cost ≈ $61k/yr · two partner inquiries on file · county growing, lakefront access | 22 | 48 | 86 | 51 |
| Former parsonage — vacant 3 yrsresidential street, modest market · deferred maintenance ≈ $40k against rising comps | 12 | 30 | 38 | 81 |
An inventory in a binder; each parcel decided alone, when something forces the issue.
A living portfolio, every parcel scored four ways — the trustees argue about mission, not about missing numbers.
The closure module ends where this one begins: when a church closes, its building enters this ledger — as a question, not a residue.
Property held in trust is ministry deferred, not ministry ended. Some of those buildings are the next church plant; knowing which one is the work.
Church planting
A new church is the best news a conference can make, and the decision about where is too often a windshield tour and a hunch. Meanwhile the census tracts, the drive times, and the conference’s own coverage map say something specific — to anyone with a week to cross-tabulate them.
Score the geography instead: population growth, the gap in existing coverage, fit with the conference’s strengths, and density sufficient to sustain a congregation — each weighted in the open, every input inspectable. The cabinet argues about the weights, which is the right argument to have, instead of about whose anecdote wins.
| corridor | growth | gap | fit | density | score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corridor A41,000 new residents projected by 2030 · nearest congregation 9 mi | 86 | 91 | 74 | 81 | 84 |
| Corridor Bestablished suburb, two aging congregations nearby | 58 | 44 | 80 | 88 | 63 |
| Corridor Cfast growth, strong existing coverage | 82 | 31 | 69 | 84 | 60 |
Site selection by familiarity; the data assembled once, by hand, for the one corridor someone already favored.
Every corridor scored the same way, every spring, with the census joins already done.
Planting is adding, not cutting — the politics are clean. It is the natural first place for a conference to trust the numbers.
Clergy lifecycle & complaints
Every cabinet senses the retirement wave coming; almost none has graphed it. And when a complaint arrives, a district superintendent is often reading the judicial paragraphs for the first time with the thirty-day clocks already running.
Two quiet companions. First, the wave made visible: who reaches retirement age when, what the supply of incoming clergy looks like against it, and what that means for the appointment seasons three years out. Second, a procedural companion for complaints — every step, deadline, and right in ¶¶ 2701–2720 as a checklist, with the Judicial Council decisions that construe each paragraph one tap away. Process support only: facts about the process, never assessments of people.
The legal spine for this already exists: the full judicial-administration chapters are parsed, and all 1,473 Judicial Council decisions are cross-linked to the paragraphs they construe. And the first equity instruments have already run — de-identified, computed from the church-filed statistical tables alone, before any personal record is ever touched: a ceiling audit of who gets appointed to the largest churches, and a compensation-equity audit that found a controlled gap of 8.6 percent for women in comparable full-time appointments. Both were built to be handed to the bodies the Discipline already charges with this oversight, not published as league tables.
Retirement exposure discovered one spring at a time; complaint procedure learned mid-crisis.
The wave graphed years ahead; the procedure carried alongside, with the case law attached.
Due process is a form of care — for the complainant, the respondent, and the church. Getting the steps right is not bureaucracy; it is the promise the Discipline makes to everyone involved.
District realignment
When a conference redraws its districts — as one Texas conference just did, seven into three — the months go to assembling the picture: which churches, what drive times, what apportionment base, what clergy coverage, under every variation anyone proposes.
Scenario work under constraints: draw a candidate map and see the balance sheet of it at once — churches, members, miles, money. The tool never proposes a map. It makes every proposed map instantly legible, so the argument can be about the ministry and not about whose spreadsheet is right.
Each scenario costs a committee a month; by the third, fatigue picks the map.
A scenario costs a minute, so the body can afford to consider ten.
Boundary questions are questions about belonging. The cabinet should spend its weight there — not on reconciling totals.
The conference session
The June session is where all of it becomes action — motions, amendments, votes, minutes. That layer is not a sketch on this page: it is live software.
Plenary tracks the business of an annual conference session against its own rules: the full parsed Book of Discipline, the conference’s standing rules as a machine-readable profile, a motion taxonomy with the correct thresholds, and minutes built from a timestamped ledger of what actually happened on the floor. It is the proof that the rest of this page is buildable: the law of the church is already in the machine, and the machine already defers to the chair.
The secretary can always overrule the record. The tool tracks; the body decides. That rule, proven here, is the rule everywhere else on this page.
Modules of one practice, not seven startups — each already exists.
Running today — on a real conference, not a mockup
- The playable appointment board on this page
- Plenary, live at plenary.wrootlabs.com
- The statistics spine: 25 years, 481 congregations, closure-risk scores, five-year projections, peer cohorts, census joins
- Charge scouting reports for every charge, generated from that spine
- The charge-viability index, and the first ceiling and compensation-equity audits — de-identified, from filed tables alone
- The parsed Book of Discipline with all 1,473 Judicial Council decisions cross-linked
In build, in the open
- Charge-conference packets (the every-fall spine)
- Planting site work over census geography
- The property portfolio view (replant · hold · partner · sell)
- The property and closure chapters (¶¶ 2501–2554) into the corpus
- The complaint-process companion
- Realignment scenarios
- The second conference — turning one-conference code into configuration
How a conference starts
Not with a license. Wroot Labs runs your first cycle with you — your data, your standing rules, your fall and your spring — and hands you the keys as we go. The engagement is tiered the way your confidentiality is already tiered: it begins on the statistical tables the conference has filed for decades — everything on this page runs on those alone — and touches conference records or personal records only later, if invited, under a data-protection agreement, inside a restricted shell that mirrors who may see what today. Psychological assessments, medical records, and disciplinary files are out of scope, in writing. Your conference owns its instance and its data, and can take the full export at any time. The first year looks like consulting; the second looks like software. By then it is simply how the work gets done.
Start a conversation →