The case study
Context
The Church of Pentecost is a global church with more than 5.2 million members (5,226,271, the Church’s current official figure).
The Pentecost Workers’ Guild brings together the working professionals among its members, organised into professional guilds and through the same region, area, district and assembly structure as the Church itself.
The challenge
Professionals across a nationwide church structure had no shared place to find one another, organise by profession or be reached with opportunities. Any such place has to answer three questions before anything else:
- Is this person really a member? Access has to rest on the Church’s own records, not on a sign-up form.
- Who may see whom? A local coordinator, a district coordinator and a national administrator need different views of the same people.
- What keeps it trustworthy? Listings, endorsements and misconduct reports need a review path, not an open feed.
What we built
PentConnect — a public site and three signed-in workspaces, each shaped around one kind of work:
- Membership verification queues with bulk approval and an audit trail, including a live check against the Church’s membership reference service.
- The Church structure — region, area, district and assembly — as the backbone that scopes every role.
- Professional guilds with group chat (polls, reactions, attachments and voice notes), plus direct messages.
- A privacy-aware member directory and site-wide search.
- An opportunities board and member endorsements, both moderated by coordinators.
- A governed marketplace: coordinators vet listings before they appear on public listing, category and seller pages.
- Programmes and events, and report templates that coordinators submit and consolidate.
- A misconduct reporting and case workflow.
- Targeted announcements, a community feed, and notifications in the app, by email, by SMS and by web push.
- Administration: analytics, audit logs, roles and permissions, and integrations.
Engineering scope
A Next.js 16 and React 19 application on Supabase — Postgres with row-level security, authentication, storage and realtime — built as an installable web app with push notifications.
The schema holds about 97 tables across 89 migrations. The codebase carries unit, integration and permission tests, pgTAP database tests, Playwright journeys at 13 viewports and k6 load tests, behind a release gate in continuous integration.
Design decisions
- Verification before access: the rest of the platform opens only once membership is confirmed.
- Scope is the permission: eight roles and nineteen permissions, each limited to a place in the Church structure and to a guild.
- Governed, not open: marketplace listings, opportunities and endorsements pass a coordinator before members rely on them.
- Findable by search and AI answer engines: structured data, a sitemap, llms.txt and generated share images.
The delivered system
A complete platform — public site, member workspace, coordinator workspace and administration — delivered to the Guild. Organisational sign-off and launch sit with the Church.
