Privacy policy

Each church decides what it records about its congregation and who on its team can see it. For those records the church is responsible for the information, and we process it on the church’s behalf and only to run Parsonage for them. If you are in a church’s directory and have a question about what it holds, please ask your church first; we will help them answer.

For people who sign in to Parsonage (pastors, staff, and volunteers), we are responsible for your account information.

• Accounts: your name, email address, and a one-way hash of your password (never the password itself), and which churches you belong to.
• Church records: whatever a church’s team enters, such as names, contact details, birth and other dates, family and household connections, groups, notes and attached files, tasks, events, bulletins, and email they send.
• Public forms: when someone fills in a visitor card or prayer request on a church’s bulletin, what they type (which may include a name, email, phone, and message) goes to that church.
• Email delivery: for church email, the addresses it was sent to, whether it was delivered, bounced, or marked as spam, and unsubscribes.
• Billing: the church’s plan and subscription status. Card details are entered with Stripe and never reach our servers.
• Technical: a sign-in cookie, and the network address of requests, which we use to limit repeated sign-in and sign-up attempts and keep in server logs.

We use this information only to provide Parsonage: to show each church its own records, send the email a church asks us to send, send account email (confirming an address, resetting a password, invitations), keep the service secure, and bill for paid plans.

We do not sell information, show advertising, or use church records to build profiles or to train artificial-intelligence models. We look at a church’s records only when the church asks for help or when needed to keep the service secure and working.

Parsonage sets one cookie, which keeps you signed in. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

We rely on a few service providers, each only for the job described:

• Amazon Web Services hosts the application and its database, sends email, and stores attached files.
• Stripe processes subscription payments and holds card details.
• Google (Gemini) screens visitor cards and prayer requests for spam. When a church has turned those forms on, the text of each submission, including any name and contact details given, is sent to Google for that check. Nothing else from the directory is sent.

We may disclose information when the law requires it, and we will tell the affected church unless we are prevented from doing so.

Every church’s records are kept apart, and access is checked on our servers for every request. Notes are visible only to a church’s owners and admins, and private notes only to the person who wrote them. Connections are encrypted, passwords are hashed, and attached files are stored privately and served only after checking who is asking.

We keep a church’s records while the church uses Parsonage. When an owner deletes the church, its records and files are deleted right away; copies in backups are removed as those backups expire. When you close your account, your login and private notes are deleted; work you did for a church (such as directory records or bulletins) stays with that church.

• Churches can export all of their records at any time from Church data.
• Church owners can delete their church and everything in it.
• You can close your account from Your account.
• Anyone can unsubscribe from church email with the link in each message.
• You may have further rights under the laws where you live, such as asking for a copy or correction of your information. Contact your church or us and we will help.

Churches may record children in their directory, such as members of a family. Parsonage accounts are for adults who work for or volunteer with a church, and children should not create accounts.

If we change this policy, we will update the date above, and for significant changes we will tell church owners by email before they take effect.