Privacy Policy

We Love Church is a website platform for churches, at welove.church. It is owned and operated by Esite Online Services CC, registration number 2006/078051/23, a close corporation registered in South Africa (“We Love Church”, “we”, “us”).

Contact us at support@welove.church.

Who is responsible for your information depends on where you gave it.

• On a church’s site, the church decides what is collected and why. The church is the responsible party under POPIA, and we process the information on its instructions as its operator. Each church’s information is kept separate from every other church’s.
• On welove.church, and for the accounts of church staff who sign in to manage a site, we are the responsible party.

You may send a request about your information to the church or to us at support@welove.church. If it is the church’s to answer, we pass it on and help the church respond.

On welove.church. This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising trackers. If you email us, we keep your message and address in order to reply.

On a church’s site, depending on what you choose to do:

• Contact details: your name, email address, phone number and, where you give it, your address.
• Household details: the members of your family you add, including children, who are always linked to a parent or guardian.
• Messages: what you send through a contact or prayer form, or a request to join a small group.
• Bookings: the events you register for and the names of the people you book for.
• Giving: the gifts you make, the fund, the amount and date, and any tax certificate issued.
• Orders: what you buy from a bookstore and, for a courier order, the delivery address.
• Serving: the teams you serve on and when you are scheduled.
• Your choices: what you have consented to, and when.
• Your device: a notification subscription if you turn notifications on, and an approximate location if you choose to share one to find a congregation or group near you.
• Technical records: the address and browser your requests come from, kept in logs for security and fault-finding.

Payments are processed by Paystack. Your card details are entered on Paystack’s own secure checkout, and neither we nor the church receive or store your full card number or its security code. We receive only what is needed to record the payment: its reference, amount, date and whether it succeeded. Paystack handles your information under its own privacy policy.

• To do what you asked: answer a message, confirm a booking, deliver an order, record a gift and send its receipt.
• To run your membership of the church: your household record, your small group and your serving schedule.
• To send you the church's announcements, by email or notification, only where you have agreed to receive them.
• To meet legal duties, such as keeping records of donations for tax purposes.
• To keep the platform secure and working.

Personal information is not sold, and is not used for advertising or to build a profile of you for anybody else.

Where something depends on your consent — receiving announcements, appearing in a directory, the use of a photograph — you are asked about each purpose separately, and the wording you agreed to is kept with your answer. You may withdraw any consent at any time in the member portal, under Privacy. Every announcement email also carries a link that stops them with one click.

Receipts, booking confirmations and serving reminders are not marketing. They are sent because of something you did, and cannot be switched off separately.

A child’s information is collected only from a parent or guardian, as part of that adult’s household, and a child’s record cannot exist without one. Children do not have their own sign-in.

• The church whose site you used: its staff, and volunteer leaders for what they need — a small-group leader sees their own group, and giving records are open only to staff the church has given finance access.
• Paystack, to process payments and refunds.
• Amazon Web Services, which hosts the platform and sends its email.
• Google, only when you play an embedded YouTube video or view a map on a church’s site, which loads that content from Google.
• Authorities, where the law requires it.

The writing assistant churches may use to draft pages is not given information about members, households or giving.

The platform is hosted by Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt, Germany. Your information is therefore stored outside South Africa, in the European Union, whose data protection law gives protection at least equal to POPIA. Information is encrypted in transit and where it is stored.

• Messages sent through a contact form: 24 months.
• Prayer requests: 12 months. Messages marked confidential: 6 months.
• A member's record: 24 months after they leave the church, after which their contact details are removed.
• Records of gifts: 7 years, because tax law requires it.
• Emails to us about the platform: for as long as we are dealing with your enquiry, and up to 24 months after.

Information past its period is deleted automatically, every night.

Access to a church’s information is limited to that church’s own staff, by role, and what staff do is recorded in an activity log. Passwords are stored only in hashed form. If your information is ever compromised, you and the Information Regulator are told as soon as reasonably possible, as POPIA requires.

A church’s site uses only what it needs to work: a cookie that keeps you signed in, one that remembers the location you chose, and storage in your browser for your bookstore basket. There are no advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

Under POPIA you may:

• ask what information is held about you, and for a copy of it;
• ask for it to be corrected or deleted;
• object to how it is used, or withdraw a consent you gave;
• ask not to receive direct marketing.

Most of this you can do yourself in the member portal. Otherwise contact the church or email support@welove.church. A request is answered within 30 days, and there is no charge. Some records, such as those of gifts, must be kept for the period the law sets even after a deletion request.

If you are not satisfied with the answer, you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, inforegulator.org.za.

We may update this policy; the date at the top shows when it last changed. Questions about it, and requests under it, go to our information officer at support@welove.church.

See also our Terms and Conditions and Refund Policy.