Privacy Policy
How we collect, use, share, and protect personal information — and the difference between your account data and the data your church controls.
This policy explains how Sermon Solutions LLC d/b/a Pastor Center (“Pastor Center,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, shares, and protects personal information.
Transition for existing accounts. This policy applies immediately to accounts created on or after the Effective Date. For accounts existing before that date, the prior version dated January 8, 2025 continues to apply until the earlier of your acceptance of this policy in the Services or thirty (30) days after we notify you of it.
Read this first: we handle two very different kinds of information
1. Information about you — our customer.
When your church subscribes, we collect information about your organization and the staff who use the platform: names, emails, billing details, support conversations, and how you use the product. We decide how this information is used, and this policy governs it.
2. Information about the people in your church.
When you use Engage, the platform synchronizes records about members, guests, volunteers, donors, and children from the systems you connect. We do not decide how this information is used — your church does. We process it only on your church’s instructions, under our Data Processing Addendum.
If you attend a church that uses Pastor Center and you have questions about your information, contact your church directly. Your church controls that data. We will refer requests we receive to them and support them in responding.
1. Information We Collect
1.1 Information you give us directly
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Account and organization | Organization name, address, denomination, attendance size, campus structure |
| User identity | Name, role or title, work email, phone, password credentials |
| Billing | Billing contact, address, tax-exemption documentation, last four digits and card brand. Full payment card numbers are collected and stored by our payment processor, not by us. |
| Content you create | Sermon drafts, notes, uploaded audio and video, prompts, graphics, plans, assessment configurations |
| Support and sales | Emails, chat messages, demo notes, call recordings where you consent |
| Marketing | Course and webinar registrations, downloaded resources, event attendance |
1.2 Information collected automatically
IP address, device and browser type, operating system, referring pages, pages viewed, timestamps, feature interactions, session duration, error and diagnostic logs, and AI usage metrics such as token consumption.
1.3 Church Data collected through connected systems
When an administrator connects a system such as Planning Center, Clearstream, or a giving platform, we retrieve and store records including:
- Identity and contact: names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, birthdates, photos
- Household and relationships: household membership, family links, marital and parental relationships
- Participation: service and event attendance, check-in records including children’s check-ins, group membership, serving team assignments and schedules, membership and baptism status
- Pastoral records: notes, contact logs, follow-up assignments, tasks, workflow status
- Assessment results: spiritual gifts and personality assessment responses and outcomes
- Giving records: donation amounts, dates, funds, designations, pledge status, and donor identity. We do not receive card numbers, bank account numbers, or payment credentials, and we do not process payments.
- Communications: message content, delivery status, and opt-out status for messages sent through the platform
1.4 A note about sensitive information
Much of the information above reveals religious beliefs and religious participation — and information about children, and financial giving. Under laws including the EU and UK GDPR and several U.S. state privacy laws, this is treated as sensitive or special-category personal information warranting heightened protection.
We treat all Church Data as sensitive by default. We restrict access by role, log administrative access, and do not use it for advertising, profiling for our own purposes, model training, or any purpose other than delivering the platform to your church.
2. How We Use Information
2.1 Account Data — our purposes
- Provide, operate, secure, and support the platform
- Authenticate users and manage roles and permissions
- Process payments, subscriptions, renewals, and taxes
- Respond to support requests and communicate about the service
- Send product updates, newsletters, course content, and offers (you can unsubscribe at any time)
- Analyze usage to improve features, performance, and reliability
- Detect, investigate, and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents
- Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms
2.2 Church Data — your church’s purposes only
We process Church Data solely to perform the functions your church has enabled:
- Synchronize and maintain records from connected systems
- Calculate engagement signals and scores
- Surface follow-up opportunities and suggested next steps
- Generate drafted messages, summaries, and analyses through AI features
- Write approved updates back to connected systems, and pass approved message content to your own connected messaging account for delivery
- Secure the data, back it up, provide support, and troubleshoot
We do not use Church Data to train AI models, to build products, to market to individuals, or for any purpose of our own beyond operating the platform for your church.
2.3 Legal bases (where GDPR or UK GDPR applies)
For Account Data: performance of a contract; our legitimate interests in operating and securing the service; consent for marketing communications; and compliance with legal obligations. For Church Data, your church determines the legal basis; we act as processor.
3. Artificial Intelligence
3.1 What is sent to AI providers
To generate drafts, summaries, recommendations, and answers, we transmit relevant portions of your data to third-party AI providers. What is sent depends on the module:
- Sermons and Spiritual Gifts — prompt text, sermon and research material you have uploaded, and assessment content. Processed by Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Church Media — prompt text and the sermon content being processed. Processed by Anthropic.
- Engage — prompt text plus the specific person records needed to answer your question or draft your message, which may include name, participation signals, group and serving history, and prior contact notes. Processed by Anthropic only. Engage data is never sent to OpenAI.
We send only what the requested task requires. We do not transmit your full directory, and giving records are not included in engagement analysis.
3.2 Our commitments
- No model training. We contract with AI providers on terms that prohibit them from using our submitted data to train or improve their models.
- Minimization. We send only the data needed for the requested task, not your full directory.
- Provider retention. Our providers do not retain submitted data beyond what is necessary to return a response and, where applicable, a short abuse-monitoring window under their standard terms. Where zero-retention terms are available, we use them.
- Named providers. Our AI subprocessors are listed at pastorcenter.com/subprocessors, and we give advance notice of changes.
3.3 Automated decisions
We do not use AI to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about any individual. Engagement scores and suggestions are informational and are presented to a human being who decides what to do. Our Terms prohibit customers from using them as the sole basis for consequential decisions about a person.
4. How We Share Information
We do not sell personal information. We do not rent it. We do not share Church Data for anyone’s advertising.
We disclose information in these circumstances:
| Recipient | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Service providers (subprocessors) | Hosting, storage, database, email delivery, payment processing, AI model inference, analytics, error monitoring, customer support tooling. Each is bound by contract to confidentiality and to using data only for the services they provide us. Current list: pastorcenter.com/subprocessors |
| Connected Services you authorize | Data flows to Planning Center, Clearstream, giving platforms, or other systems only where you have connected them and enabled the relevant function. |
| Legal compliance | Where required by law, subpoena, or valid legal process. We will notify you before disclosing Church Data unless legally prohibited or where there is an imminent risk of harm. |
| Protection of rights | To investigate fraud, security incidents, or violations of our Terms, or to protect the safety of any person. |
| Business transfer | In a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets. Your data remains subject to this policy or a policy no less protective, and we will give notice. |
| With your direction | When you instruct us to share. |
Marketing and analytics on our public website. Our marketing website uses cookies and advertising technologies, including the Meta pixel and web analytics. These may involve sharing identifiers with advertising partners in ways that certain state laws define as “sharing” or “selling.” These technologies are not used inside the logged-in application and never involve Church Data. See Section 9 and our Cookie settings to opt out.
5. Security
We maintain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards including:
- Encryption of data in transit (TLS) and at rest
- Role-based access control, with Engage permissions scoped so leaders see only the people they are responsible for, and giving data restricted to designated giving administrators
- Least-privilege internal access, with logging of administrative access to customer environments
- Credential and API token encryption
- Multi-factor authentication available for accounts
- Regular backups and tested restoration
- Vendor security review before onboarding subprocessors
- A documented incident response process
No system is perfectly secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, and you are responsible for protecting credentials, configuring roles correctly, and removing access for departed staff.
Incident notification. If we become aware of a breach affecting your data, we will notify your designated contact without undue delay and no later than 72 hours after confirming it, with the information required for you to meet your own notification obligations.
6. Retention
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account and billing records | Duration of the relationship, then as required for tax, accounting, and legal purposes (generally 7 years) |
| Church Data | Duration of your subscription; export available for 30 days after termination; deleted or de-identified within 60 days after that |
| Backups | Purged on a rolling schedule, generally within 90 days |
| Support records | 3 years |
| Marketing contacts | Until you unsubscribe, then a suppression record to honor your opt-out |
| Security and audit logs | Up to 24 months |
Data written into a connected system at your direction stays in that system. Deleting it there is your responsibility.
7. Your Rights and Choices
7.1 If you are a Pastor Center account holder
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a portable copy of your personal information; to opt out of marketing; to opt out of “sale,” “sharing,” or targeted advertising; to limit use of sensitive information; to withdraw consent; and to appeal a denied request. You will not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.
To exercise rights: email privacy@pastorcenter.com or use the tools in account settings. We verify requests before acting and respond within the timeframe required by applicable law (generally 45 days, extendable once). You may authorize an agent to act for you with proof of authorization.
Appeals. If we deny a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision with “Appeal” in the subject line. We will respond within 45 days with our reasoning. Residents of certain states may then contact their state Attorney General.
7.2 If you attend a church that uses Pastor Center
Your church controls your information, not us. Direct requests for access, correction, or deletion to your church. If you contact us, we will forward your request to the church and assist them in responding, but we cannot act on your data without their instruction.
7.3 Marketing
Unsubscribe from any marketing email or email privacy@pastorcenter.com. We will still send transactional and service messages such as billing notices, security alerts, and material changes to this policy.
8. Children
The Services are designed for churches and their staff and are not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children for our own purposes.
However, a church using Engage may submit records about minors, including children’s check-in data and youth participation. That data is submitted by the church under its own legal authority — including any parental consent required by law — as set out in our Terms. We process it only as the church’s service provider, restrict access by role, and do not use it for any purpose of our own. If you believe a child’s information has been submitted without proper authority, contact your church and email us at privacy@pastorcenter.com.
9. Cookies and Tracking
Our public marketing site uses:
- Essential cookies — authentication, security, and core functionality (cannot be disabled)
- Analytics cookies — how visitors find and use the site
- Advertising cookies and pixels — including the Meta pixel, to measure campaigns and show ads to people who have visited the site
Manage preferences through our cookie banner or your browser settings. We honor Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out of sale and sharing where required. The logged-in application uses only essential cookies. No advertising or third-party marketing trackers operate on Church Data.
10. State-Specific Disclosures (U.S.)
Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Utah, Oregon, Montana, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have the rights described in Section 7.
California. In the preceding 12 months we collected the categories in Section 1 for the purposes in Section 2 and disclosed them to the recipients in Section 4. We do not sell personal information. We may “share” website visitor identifiers for cross-context behavioral advertising through the technologies in Section 9; opt out via our cookie banner, a Global Privacy Control signal, or by emailing privacy@pastorcenter.com. We collect sensitive personal information only as described in Section 1.4 and use it solely to provide the Services — never for inferring characteristics about you.
Service provider status. With respect to Church Data, we act as a service provider (California) or processor (other states). We do not retain, use, or disclose Church Data for any purpose other than performing the Services, will not sell or share it, and will not combine it with information from other sources except as permitted by law.
11. International Users and Transfers
The Services are hosted in the United States. If you access them from elsewhere, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may not provide the same protections as your jurisdiction.
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, transfers are made under the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, incorporated into our Data Processing Addendum. EU and UK customers may request a copy at privacy@pastorcenter.com.
12. Third-Party Services
The Services link to and integrate with products we do not control, including Planning Center, Clearstream, giving platforms, and social media. Their privacy practices are their own. Review their policies before connecting them. Our subprocessor list at pastorcenter.com/subprocessors identifies vendors acting on our behalf, which is different from services you independently connect.
13. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy. For material changes we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email to account contacts and by posting a notice in the Services, and where required will obtain renewed consent. Prior versions are archived at pastorcenter.com/privacy/archive.
14. Contact
Sermon Solutions LLC d/b/a Pastor Center
11184 Sand Pine Ct, Fort Myers, FL 33913
Privacy questions and rights requests: privacy@pastorcenter.com
Security: security@pastorcenter.com
General support: support@pastorcenter.com
Pastor Center is a trade name of Sermon Solutions LLC. Charges may appear on your statement as SERMON SOLUTIONS or PASTOR CENTER.
Version 2.0 — Effective August 10, 2026