Privacy Policy

Word of Life Digital Campus (“WOLMTX”) is the online campus of Word of Life, a Christian church in Texas (“Word of Life”, “the church”, “we”). This policy covers this website and everything on it: the public pages, Live Church, the ministry rooms, guest and member accounts, the Command Center our staff use, and the notifications the site sends.

It describes what the site actually does today. Where a feature exists in the software but is switched off, we say so rather than describing it as if it were on.

• You can watch, read and follow Word of Life without an account, and without giving us your name.
• We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use advertising or analytics trackers.
• Private things — prayer, pastoral care, giving, your children's records, your Spiritual Assessment — are seen only by the people whose ministry role requires it, and that rule is enforced by the system, not just hidden on screen.
• Card details go directly to Square. They never pass through or stay on our servers.
• Children do not have accounts. A parent or guardian adds a child's record to their own account, and nothing about a child is ever public.
• You can ask us to delete your information. Some records — financial records of gifts, and safeguarding records — are kept because the church must keep them.

If you visit without an account

Reading pages and watching a service stores nothing about you. Our web server does not keep access logs. To protect forms from abuse, the site briefly counts requests from each connection's IP address; that count is held only in the running server's memory, is never written to our database, a file or a log, and disappears whenever the server restarts.

If you follow a room without an account

Following Sunday Worship, the Miracle Room, the Forgiveness Room or Word of Life without an account creates a random key in a cookie in your browser. We store only a one-way hash of that key, which rooms you follow and when you agreed. There is no name, email address, phone number or IP address in it. If you turn on browser notifications, we also store the push address your browser gives us and a general description of the device, such as “Chrome on Android”.

If you respond during a Live Church service

The Respond panel lets you ask for prayer or say you want to talk with someone, without an account. What you send — your first name, how to reach you if you choose to give it, your message, and — only if you leave contact details — whether you are under 18 — goes to the pastoral team. If a message shows that someone may be in danger, the site shows immediate help instead of placing it in a queue.

If you create an account

We ask for a display name, an email address and a password. The password is stored only as a secure hash. We record whether the account is an adult account or a youth account (a youth account is created by a parent or guardian), and whether you joined as a guest family or a member. We do not ask for your date of birth, home address or phone number, and the site has no field to hold them.

What you choose to do with an account

Depending on what you use, the site keeps:

• My Journey and discipleship — your New Life Journey, the steps you mark done, a request to be walked with by someone, milestones the pastoral team records with you (such as baptism), and the record of a welcome.
• Spiritual Assessment — your answers, including anything you write, and a note the pastor makes to prepare a conversation with you.
• Groups, classes and learning — groups you join, classes you enroll in, lessons, quizzes and activities you finish. We record that you finished, never a score.
• Invitations — invitation links you make and a count of what came of them. Opening an invitation link counts the visit and stores nothing about the person who opened it.
• Prayer and praise — entries you send to the Prayer & Praise Wall (published only after review, under your first name or anonymously, as you choose) and the “prayed” and “amen” you press.
• Pastoral care — appointments you book, questions you ask the Answer Desk and their answers, and safeguarding concerns you raise.
• Testimonies — what you write, and the permission you give for it to be published. You can withdraw that permission.
• Notes and saved verses — private to you. A guest's service notes stay in their own browser and are not sent to us.
• Serving — ministry teams you join, training you complete, where you are scheduled to serve, and, for roles working with children or youth, whether a background check was cleared and until when. What a check found is never stored on this site.
• Events and check-in — events you register for, and check-ins at gatherings. When staff check in a visitor at the door they may record the visitor's name and email address.
• Business Connect — a business listing you choose to publish, with the contact details you choose to make public.
• Live chat — messages you post, shown with your display name.
• Television pairing — a pairing code and a name for the screen.
• Notifications — the notifications the site sends you, and whether you have read them.

If you give

For each gift we record the amount, the fund, whether it is one-time or monthly, its status and date, and Square's reference numbers and receipt link, linked to your account if you were signed in. We do not store card details. A gift made without an account is stored without a name or email address. For monthly giving you must give an email address, which goes to Square for receipts.

If you use voice or sound features

Speaking to the site's Guide uses your browser's own speech recognition. Depending on the browser, your speech may be sent to an outside speech service to be turned into text — in Chrome and Edge that is Google's — and the site says so before you use it. Voice is optional, and WOLMTX does not record audio. The Sound Check tool measures your microphone on your device and sends only the measurements. We do not collect fingerprints, face scans, voiceprints or any other biometric identifier.

We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13 without a parent or guardian.

• Children do not have accounts or sign in. A parent or guardian adds a child to their own account with a first name and one of four age groups. There is no surname, birthday, school, photograph or contact detail for a child anywhere on the site.
• What a child does in Children's World — lessons finished, and questions or prayers the child sends — is recorded against that child and seen by the child's guardian and the children's ministry staff.
• Youth accounts are created by a parent or guardian, who can see and manage them. A youth account cannot post in public chat, publish a testimony or a prayer wall entry, or be paired with an adult for discipleship, and its questions go to the youth ministry team.
• Nothing about a child or a young person appears on any public page, directory, search result or map. There is no private messaging and no child-to-child chat.
• Photographs and videos published for Children's World and Youth Connect must be confirmed by staff as showing no identifiable child.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has given us information without you, use the Data Deletion page. Word of Life will review it with its safeguarding staff, and the page explains what can be deleted and what must be kept.

We use information to:

• run the features you use — your account, your journey, your classes, following a room;
• care for people — prayer, pastoral conversations, discipleship and welcome;
• keep children and young people safe, and keep volunteer screening current;
• process gifts through Square and keep the church's financial records;
• send the notifications you asked for, and nothing else;
• keep the site secure and stop abuse; and
• meet legal obligations, including mandatory reporting.

We do not sell personal information, rent it, trade it, or share it with anyone for advertising. We do not build advertising profiles. Giving is never a factor in anyone's place in the church, and no one's giving is shown to other members. No member's information is sent to any artificial-intelligence service; the site's Guide runs on the site itself.

WOLMTX does not currently send email. It does not send text messages, and it collects no phone numbers for texting.

Your own records are yours to see. Other members never see your contact details, giving, prayer requests, pastoral care, assessment or household.

Staff sign in to the Command Center with their own accounts, and each account is given specific responsibilities. A responsibility opens only the records that work needs, and no responsibility implies another: the pastoral team sees pastoral care; finance sees giving; safeguarding sees screenings and concerns; children's ministry sees children's records; a website administrator manages pages and media and sees none of those. Staff accounts can see the display name and email address of member accounts in order to administer them.

Some things cannot be read by anyone on staff: your private notes, and the technical details of your browser notifications.

We share information with other companies only where they perform a service for the church, and only what that service needs.

• Square processes gifts. You type your card into Square's own form, served by Square, and Square receives the card, the amount, the fund and any email address you give. For monthly giving Square keeps a customer record with your email address and an internal account number from our site. Square's own privacy notice governs what it does with that information, and its script runs on the Give page.
• Browser push services deliver notifications you turned on. The service is chosen by your browser — Google for Chrome, Mozilla for Firefox, Apple for Safari, Microsoft for Edge. The message is encrypted and contains the name of the room and a link to it.
• Your browser's speech service, if you use voice with the Guide, as described above.
• YouTube and Vimeo, only if the church places one of their videos on a page. The video player loads from their servers and they may set their own cookies. YouTube videos use its privacy-enhanced mode.
• Hosting. The site and its database run on a virtual private server the church rents from Hostinger. Backups are kept on the same server.

The site loads no advertising, analytics or social-media tracking code, and its fonts are served from our own server rather than a third party.

WOLMTX does not use Facebook Login. You cannot sign in with Facebook, and the site does not receive, request or store information about Facebook users — no Facebook profile, friends list, email address or user identifier. The site does not use the Meta Pixel, Meta's advertising tools or any Facebook tracking code.

The one connection is outbound. When the church connects its Facebook Page, WOLMTX can publish a post to that Page when a live room opens. The post contains the church's own words and a link back to this site. No information about any visitor or member is sent to Meta. Who sees a post on Facebook is decided by Meta and by each person's own Facebook settings.

When someone shares a link to this site on Facebook, Facebook fetches the public page and its share image, as it does for any website. Anything you do on Facebook itself — liking, commenting on or sharing the church's posts — is governed by Meta's policies and managed in your Facebook account.

The site uses only these, and none of them is used for advertising or tracking:

• wol-token — keeps you signed in. It lasts 14 days for member accounts and 8 hours for staff accounts, and is removed when you sign out.
• wol_follow_key — the random key for following rooms without an account. It lasts one year, and is removed when you sign in (your follows move to your account) or when you erase it from the Data Deletion page.
• Settings kept in your browser — whether Easy View is on, whether reactions are hidden, your service notes as a guest, whether you already responded in a service, the reference of a response you made at the altar, and the amount and receipt of a gift you just made. These stay on your device.
• Two further cookies remember the Command Center's display theme and language for staff.

On the Give page, Square's own script may use cookies or similar storage for payment security and fraud prevention. Clearing your browser's storage for this site removes everything above.

We keep pastoral conversations and prayer requests confidential within the ministry roles that need them. Texas law recognizes a privilege for confidential communications made to a member of the clergy as a spiritual adviser, but that confidentiality has limits.

• Abuse and neglect. Texas law requires any person who has cause to believe that a child is being abused or neglected to report it to the authorities, and that duty applies to ministers even for communications that would otherwise be privileged (Texas Family Code, chapter 261). Texas law also requires reporting the abuse, neglect or exploitation of an elderly person or a person with a disability (Texas Human Resources Code, chapter 48). Word of Life complies with these duties.
• Danger. If information shows that someone is in immediate danger, we may share it with emergency services or others who can help.
• Legal process. We may disclose information when required by law — for example, by a subpoena or court order — and to protect the rights, property or safety of the church, the people it serves, or others.
• Church transitions. If Word of Life's ministry were reorganized or joined with another church, records could pass to the ministry that continues its work, under the same protections.

The site is served only over encrypted HTTPS connections. Passwords are stored as secure hashes. Guest follower keys and deletion-request status keys are stored only as one-way hashes. Access rules are enforced by the database layer, so a record a role may not see is not sent to that role at all. Sign-in is locked after repeated failed attempts. Card details never reach our servers.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach of security exposes personal information, Word of Life will notify the people affected and the authorities as applicable law requires. Texas's breach-notification law requires notice to affected Texas residents within 60 days of determining that a breach of sensitive personal information occurred, and notice to the Texas Attorney General when 250 or more Texans are affected. Word of Life follows that standard.

• Your account and what you did with it — until you ask us to delete it, or the church removes the account.
• Following without an account — until you unfollow or erase it. The key in your browser expires after one year.
• Live chat — cleared when the next service begins. Reactions are held for a few seconds and never linked to anyone.
• Respond messages from a Live Church service — kept as pastoral care records. They are not linked to any account and are not deleted automatically.
• Gift records — kept as the church's financial records for as long as accounting, tax and audit purposes require, even after an account is deleted.
• Safeguarding records and records of serving — including concerns raised, screening outcomes and ministry service — kept, because the church must be able to show who served with children and youth and what was reported.
• The server's error log — messages the application writes when something goes wrong are kept by the server for seven days, for fixing faults. They are not used to follow anyone's use of the site.
• Backups — the database and uploaded files are backed up nightly and each backup is kept for 30 days, so information you delete remains in backups for up to 30 days before it is gone for good.

• You can use most of WOLMTX without an account.
• You can unfollow any room, pause all notifications, or turn off browser notifications at any time.
• You can delete verses you saved, withdraw a testimony, withdraw a question you asked the Answer Desk, and clear your Spiritual Assessment, from the pages where you made them.
• You can see most of what the site holds about you by signing in to your account.
• You can ask Word of Life to delete your information. The Data Deletion page explains exactly what is deleted, what is kept and why, and gives you a key to follow your request.

Word of Life offers these choices to everyone who uses WOLMTX, wherever they live.

When what the site collects, shares or keeps changes, this policy changes with it, and the date at the top changes. The same policy applies to information collected before the change unless we tell you otherwise.

Word of Life has not yet published an email address or telephone number on this site for privacy questions. Until it does, there are two ways to reach the church about your information: make a request on the Data Deletion page, which is recorded, reviewed by a member of staff and can be tracked with the key it gives you; or speak to someone in person at a Word of Life gathering.