Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Inner City Tabernacle (“ICT”, “we”, “us”) is a local church in Suva, Fiji, affiliated with the Assemblies of God of Fiji. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy.

1 Davey Street, YMCA Sports Club, Off Waimanu Road, Suva, Fiji · 865 2200 · innercitytabernacle@gmail.com

2. What information we collect

If you visit us or plan a visit

• Your name, and if you choose to give them, your mobile number and email address
• How you heard about ICT, and who invited you
• Whether you would like someone from the church to contact you

If you become a member

• Your name, date of birth and gender
• Your contact details — address, mobile, phone, email, and how you prefer to be contacted
• Your membership roll number, the date you joined, and your membership status
• Milestones in your walk with God that you tell us about — for example whether you have been born again, discipled, baptised in water or baptised in the Holy Spirit, and whether you would like to join classes
• The ministries and Connect Groups you belong to
• Whether you consent to being contacted by church leadership

If you serve on staff or lead a ministry

• Your name, email address and phone number, your role, and the ministries you serve in
• Your account sign-in details (your password is stored only in encrypted form — see section 8)
• A record of significant actions you take in the system, for accountability

Church records

• Giving and offering records, budgets, expenses and receipts
• Ministry reports, board minutes, agendas and church documents
• Attendance records where a ministry keeps them
• Photographs taken at church events (see section 12)

Church health survey

If you take part in a church health survey, your answers are collected anonymously. We do not record who gave which answers, and we only ever look at the combined results.

3. Why we collect it

• To welcome you, follow up with you, and care for you pastorally
• To run the life of the church — services, ministries, Connect Groups, classes and events
• To keep proper financial records and account faithfully for money given to the church
• To meet our reporting and governance obligations to our board and to the Assemblies of God of Fiji
• To communicate with you about church life, in the way you have told us you prefer

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for commercial advertising.

4. Consent

Giving us your details is voluntary. Where we ask for your consent — for example to be contacted by church leadership — we record that you gave it and when. You can change your mind at any time by telling us (see section 15); we will update our records and respect your decision.

5. Who inside the church can see your information

Access is limited by role, and the system enforces this. In general:

• Ministry leaders see the members of the ministries they lead, and their own ministry's records
• Pastors and the Senior Pastor see membership and pastoral information across the church
• The Treasurer sees financial records, but not the general membership roll
• The Board Secretary sees board documents and ministry reporting
• The System Administrator can access the system as a whole in order to maintain it

Everyone with an account agrees to keep what they see confidential, and to use it only for their role in the church. Significant actions are logged.

6. Children and young people

Some of our ministries — including children's ministry, Sunday School and our youth ministry — involve children and young people. Where we hold information about a child (for example a name on a class register, an attendance record, or a photograph):

• We collect only what we genuinely need to run the ministry and to keep children safe
• We rely on the consent of a parent or guardian
• Access is limited to the leaders of that ministry and to church leadership
• A parent or guardian may ask at any time to see what we hold about their child, to correct it, to have it deleted, or to ask that their child not be photographed

7. Our use of artificial intelligence

We use an AI assistant (which we call Timothy) to help our leaders with written work — for example drafting a ministry newsletter from the notes a team has submitted, compiling a quarterly report, summarising a church health survey, or reading an uploaded document. You should know that:

• To do this, the relevant text or document is sent securely to our AI provider (Anthropic) for processing
• We do not send the membership roll, contact details, or individual giving records to the AI
• The AI only ever produces a draft. A person reviews, edits and approves everything before it is saved, published or sent
• No decision about a person is made by the AI

8. Where your information is stored, and how it is protected

The system is hosted with reputable providers. The database and uploaded files are held with Supabase (in a data centre in Japan), the application runs on Render, and the website is served by Netlify. These providers process information on our behalf under their own security commitments.

Protections in place include:

• All traffic to and from the site is encrypted in transit (HTTPS)
• Passwords are never stored in readable form — they are stored as a one-way encrypted hash
• Sign-in sessions expire, and access is controlled by role
• Protections against automated attacks and abuse
• An audit trail of significant actions

No system can be guaranteed completely secure, but we take the trust you place in us seriously, and we will tell you promptly if something goes wrong that affects your information.

9. How long we keep it

• Membership and pastoral records — for as long as you are part of the church family, and for a reasonable period afterwards so we can maintain our history and respond to enquiries
• Visitor details — kept while we follow up; removed on request
• Financial records — kept for the period required for proper accounting and audit
• Board minutes and church records — kept as part of the permanent record of the church
• Survey responses — kept in anonymous, combined form only

10. Who we share it with

We do not sell or trade your information. We share it only:

• With the service providers named in section 8, who host and process it on our behalf
• In summary or statistical form (not naming individuals) with the Assemblies of God of Fiji, as part of our reporting as an affiliated church
• Where we are required to by law
• Where you have asked us to

11. Your rights

You may ask us to:

• Tell you what information we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong or out of date
• Delete your information, where we are not required to keep it
• Stop contacting you, or change how we contact you
• Withdraw a consent you previously gave

Just contact us (section 15). We will not treat you differently for asking.

12. Photographs

We take photographs at services and church events, and may use them on this website, in newsletters and in reports, to tell the story of what God is doing among us. If you — or your child — would prefer not to appear, tell us and we will respect that and remove existing images where we reasonably can.

13. Cookies and embedded content

This website does not use advertising or tracking cookies. The church management system uses a single essential item of browser storage to keep you signed in while you are using it.

Some pages may embed content from other services — for example a live stream from Facebook. When that content loads, the provider may set its own cookies and collect information according to their privacy policy, which we do not control.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information we will update this page and change the date at the top.

See also our Terms & Conditions and End User Agreement.