The Sonship Place (T.S.P.) Church
Last updated April 2026. Questions? Email contact@tsp.church.
This privacy policy applies to The Sonship Place (T.S.P.) Church (referred to as "T.S.P.", "we", "us", or "our") and describes how we collect, use, store, and protect your personal data. T.S.P. is operated through two registered legal entities:
Our website is tsp.church. Our primary contact email is contact@tsp.church.
We collect personal data in four protection categories. We collect only what is necessary for you to engage with our church family and formation resources. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information.
We classify all personal data into four protection tiers.
Tier 1: Sacred Private
Bible annotations (your personal notes on scripture) and Bible plan progress. These records are yours alone. No member of the T.S.P. staff, pastoral team, or technical team can read your Tier 1 data. This is enforced at the database level by row-level security policies that permit access only to your own authenticated session.
Tier 2: Personal
Your profile (name, email address, phone number, date of birth, profile photo), journal entries, prayer requests, giving transactions, and formation progress records. You own this data. Staff access is permitted only within their pastoral or administrative role and is logged to a tamper-evident audit trail.
Tier 3: Sensitive Pastoral
Crisis alert records, care requests, care intake forms, welfare cases, pastoral meeting notes, pulse checks, altar-call responses, and safeguarding reports. Access is restricted to the pastoral team only, every access is logged, and all records in this tier are retained for seven years for safeguarding and continuity-of-care purposes.
Tier 4: Operational
Sermon content, declarations, app configuration, gathering schedules, and other operational data. This data is either public or accessible to all authenticated users and carries no elevated protection requirement.
Giving data is processed by Zeffy (USD) and Providus Bank or Mono (Nigerian naira). No payment card data is stored by T.S.P.
We process personal data only when we have a lawful basis to do so.
Consent
We process your Bible annotations, journal entries, prayer requests, and care intake submissions on the basis of your explicit consent. You can withdraw consent at any time using the deletion and export tools in the T.S.P. app or by contacting us. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing that took place before withdrawal.
Contract
We process your profile, formation progress, and attendance records on the basis that processing is necessary to provide the membership service you have registered for.
Legal Obligation
We process safeguarding records, welfare disbursement records, and giving statements on the basis of our legal obligations under child-protection law, charity-regulation law, and tax law in each jurisdiction where T.S.P. operates.
Vital Interests
When our crisis-detection system identifies a risk to life in text you submit, we process that information on the basis of vital interests. Every crisis alert is reviewed by a human pastor before any action is taken.
Legitimate Interests
We process attendance records, role transition logs, gathering feedback, and anonymised analytics on the basis of our legitimate interest in running a safe and well-organised church. We have assessed that these interests are not overridden by your rights and freedoms.
Some data we process is special-category data under data-protection law because it relates to your religious beliefs, health, or pastoral disclosures. We rely on your explicit consent (GDPR Article 9(2)(a)) and on our status as a not-for-profit religious body (GDPR Article 9(2)(d)) as the additional legal basis for processing this data.
We use your data to:
We do not use your data for automated pastoral decision-making. No AI system generates pastoral responses or care messages that are sent directly to you without human review.
We share personal data only with service providers who process data on our behalf under a written Data Processing Agreement. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with any third party for their own purposes.
The following 18 service providers process data on our behalf:
We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with any third party for their own purposes.
At launch, we do not use tracking cookies or advertising pixels on tsp.church.
We use PostHog in cookieless mode for aggregate product analytics. Events contain only anonymous usage counts. No personal identifiers are included. PostHog processes this data in the EU (Frankfurt). You may opt out of analytics at any time in your account settings.
We do not serve advertising on tsp.church or in the T.S.P. Church App. Third-party video embeds (YouTube) may set their own cookies when you interact with embedded video content.
Retention periods depend on the tier of data and the legal basis for processing.
Database backups include your personal data for up to 30 days (point-in-time recovery window). After 30 days, backup data is purged automatically. Deletion requests are fulfilled on the live database within 24 hours; backup purge follows within 30 days.
Anonymised analytics events are retained for 12 months in PostHog. Raw event data on our side expires after 30 days.
Depending on your jurisdiction, you have the following rights regarding your personal data.
These rights apply under GDPR (European residents), UK-GDPR (UK residents), NDPR and the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 (Nigerian residents), CCPA (California residents), and related frameworks. To exercise any of them, email contact@tsp.church with the subject line "Data Request". We will respond within 30 days.
You can request:
To verify your identity, send your request from the email address associated with your T.S.P. account. If you do not have an account, include enough identifying information for us to locate your data (such as the name you used when submitting a care request). We will never release data to a third party claiming to act on your behalf without written authorisation from you.
We do not make solely automated decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you. The T.S.P. crisis-detection system is a decision-support tool; every crisis alert is reviewed by a human pastor before any action is taken.
T.S.P. requires all users to be 18 years of age or older to register independently. Users under 18 must have a parent or legal guardian register on their behalf. The parent or guardian is the account holder and their contact details are used for all communication.
Under the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, 15 U.S.C. §6501), we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. If a user is identified as under 13 during sign-up, parental or guardian consent is required before the account is activated. If you believe a child under 13 has submitted data without parental consent, please contact us immediately and we will delete it within 48 hours.
This policy complies with COPPA (US), GDPR Article 8 and UK-GDPR (EU and UK), the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and NDPR, and equivalent legislation in all jurisdictions where T.S.P. operates.
Children registered through a household account (the kids check-in feature) are represented by a kids profile linked to the guardian's account. Kids profiles carry no authentication credentials. All activity is logged against the guardian account. Photo consent for minors is collected separately from the guardian and is automatically invalidated when the minor turns 18.
For users under 18 accessing formation pathways (particularly trauma-informed content), additional parental or guardian informed consent is required. See our Safeguarding Policy for details.
Technical measures include: database encryption at rest and in transit, row-level security on all tables, TLS 1.3 for all client traffic, HTTP Strict Transport Security with preload, Content Security Policy, rate limiting on all API routes, structured audit logging of all access to Tier 2 and Tier 3 data, and automated weekly enforcement of retention periods.
T.S.P. operates across multiple regions. Your data may be processed in countries outside your own.
Primary data processing occurs in the United States (Supabase, GCP, Cloudflare, Resend, LiveKit, Expo, Anthropic, OpenAI, Zeffy). Analytics and error-monitoring processing occurs in the EU (PostHog Frankfurt, Sentry Germany).
For transfers of EU or UK resident data to US-based processors, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) Module 2 (Controller-to-Processor) under GDPR Article 46(2)(c). We do not rely solely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. All US processors have written Data Processing Agreements in place.
Nigerian resident data processed by Providus Bank and Mono remains in Nigeria. For Nigerian residents whose data transits US-based processors, we apply the requirements of the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023.
Regional addenda for UK, UAE, and Canada are in preparation and will be published at tsp.church/privacy before T.S.P. activates services in those regions.
We may update this policy as we add new features, services, or as applicable law changes. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Material changes will be communicated to registered users by email at least 14 days before they take effect.
For privacy questions, data requests, or safeguarding concerns, contact us at contact@tsp.church. We aim to respond within 5 business days.
Phone: +1 206 730 6292.
Data controller: contact@tsp.church. For formal data protection enquiries, use the subject line "Data Protection" to ensure your message is routed correctly.
A Data Protection Officer appointment is pending before public launch. Until then, all data-protection enquiries are handled at contact@tsp.church.