Privacy Policy

Who We Are

The Sunday Thread is a product of The Sunday Thread LLC, a Minnesota limited liability company. We provide a church discipleship platform that transforms Sunday sermons into daily devotional content delivered to congregation members throughout the week.

If you have questions about this policy, contact us at hello@thesundaythread.org.

What We Collect

We collect only what is necessary to deliver the service.

For church accounts (pastors):

• Name, email address, and password
• Church name and location
• Sermon recordings or transcripts you upload
• Billing information (processed by Stripe — we never store full card numbers)
• Care Protocol responses required before congregation features activate

For congregation members:

• First and last name
• Email address and password
• Date of birth (to verify you are 13 or older)
• Account type (in person, online attendee, or campus)
• Delivery preference and notification time
• Phone number, if you choose text message delivery
• Your church's invite code, to link your account to your church
• Time zone (set automatically from your device)

Usage data we collect automatically:

• Which daily content pieces you mark as read
• Push notification subscription tokens (if you enable push notifications)
• Standard server logs (IP address, browser type, timestamps) for security and debugging

Questions and Prayers Are Confidential, Not Anonymous

When you submit a question or a prayer through the app, your name is stored with it and your pastor can see who wrote it. Your pastor holds it the way they hold anything said in their office — it stays between you and them.

We changed this deliberately in August 2026. These submissions used to be stored anonymously. We stopped doing that because a pastor could learn that someone in their congregation was in crisis and be unable to find out who, or follow up — which is not safer than knowing.

Encouragements are different and remain anonymous. Encouragements are shared with other members of your church, so no name is attached to them and your pastor cannot see who wrote one.

All submissions pass through an automated safety screening before storage. If a submission contains signals of crisis or danger, calm crisis resources are offered to you immediately, and the submission is flagged for urgent pastoral attention. In that case your name is also shared with the person your church has designated to respond to urgent situations, so that someone is able to reach you. This is the only circumstance in which anyone other than your pastor sees who wrote a submission.

Your pastor is also a mandated reporter under the law of your state, exactly as they are in any other pastoral conversation. Nothing here prevents them from making a report the law requires.

How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Deliver daily devotional content to you at your chosen time and through your chosen channel
• Generate content from your pastor's sermons using AI (pastors only)
• Send the Shepherd's Thread pastoral briefings to your pastor (pastors only)
• Process billing and manage your subscription (pastors only)
• Provide aggregate congregation analytics to your pastor (question counts, read rates, recurring themes — reported as totals and patterns, never as a list of who read or asked what)
• Operate, maintain, and improve the platform
• Respond to your support requests

We never use member information to train AI models. Nothing a member writes — questions, prayers, encouragements, or anything else they submit — is used to train or improve any AI model, ours or anyone else's.

Your church's sermons are used to build a voice profile for your church, so the daily content sounds like your pastor. That profile is built only from your own church's sermons, is used only to generate content for your own church, and is never used for any other church or for any general-purpose AI model.

Text Message Delivery (SMS)

If you choose to receive your daily thread by text message, you agree to receive automated daily text messages from your church through The Sunday Thread. Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies — typically one message per day, Monday through Saturday.

Reply STOP at any time to unsubscribe. Reply HELP for support. You can also update your delivery preferences at any time in the app.

Your phone number is used only to deliver your daily thread. It is never sold, shared with advertisers, or used for marketing purposes.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third parties, except as required to deliver the messages themselves.

SMS messaging is provided through Twilio. Twilio's privacy policy is available at twilio.com/legal/privacy.

Who We Share Information With

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the services required to operate the platform:

• Supabase — database and authentication infrastructure
• Anthropic — AI content generation from sermon transcripts, and automated safety screening of submissions. The screening receives only the text you wrote; your name is not sent to Anthropic and the screening cannot see who you are.
• OpenAI — audio transcription of sermon recordings (church accounts only)
• Resend — email delivery
• Twilio — SMS delivery
• Stripe — payment processing (church accounts only)
• Netlify — application hosting

Each of these providers is contractually bound to use your data only to provide their service to us. We do not share your information with your church's pastor beyond what the platform is designed to show — and what the platform shows your pastor is described in this policy.

We may disclose information if required by law, or if we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the safety of any person.

Cookies and Local Storage

The Sunday Thread does not use advertising cookies, analytics trackers, or any third-party tracking scripts. We use only functional browser storage — to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, and make the app work offline. This storage is essential to operating the service and is never used to profile you or follow you across other sites.

Data Retention

We retain your account information for as long as your account is active.

If you delete your account, it is deleted immediately and permanently — your account, your profile, and your personal information are removed the moment you confirm, and your name is severed from any questions or prayers you submitted at that same moment. Those submissions are kept without an author, so that they no longer identify you and cannot be traced back to you by anyone, including us.

Deletion cannot be undone. Because it is immediate, a pastor who was part-way through responding to something you wrote will no longer be able to reach you through the platform afterward.

Encouragements never had a name attached, so nothing about them changes when you close your account.

Sermon transcripts and generated content are retained for as long as your church account is active, so your church's own voice profile stays current. As described above, that profile is built only from your church's sermons and used only for your church. You may request deletion at any time.

Children's Privacy

The Sunday Thread requires all members to be at least 13 years old. We verify age at account creation. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected information from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly.

Teen devotional content is written for teens, who are 13 or older and hold their own accounts. Kids devotional content is written for children under 13, who do not have accounts of their own — a parent, guardian, or church leader reads it and does it with them through their own account.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate information
• Request deletion of your account and personal information
• Opt out of text message delivery at any time by replying STOP
• Update your delivery preferences at any time in the app

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@thesundaythread.org. We will respond within 30 days.

Security

We use industry-standard security practices including encrypted connections (HTTPS), row-level database security, and strict access controls. API keys and credentials are never stored in client-facing code. Questions and prayers are stored with the author's identity, and access to them is restricted at the database level to that member's own pastor — a pastor cannot read another church's submissions, and members cannot read each other's.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately at hello@thesundaythread.org.

Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify church account holders by email at least 14 days before the changes take effect. Continued use of the platform after that date constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

The effective date at the top of this page reflects when the current version took effect.

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