How Word of God Church collects, uses and protects your personal information.
[EDIT] marker below needs a real value before this goes live, and it's worth a final read-through by whoever registers as your Information Officer. This is a starting point, not legal advice.
This website is run by Word of God Church (Perfect Life Movement), 31 Burma Road, Southport, Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA), Word of God Church is the "responsible party" for personal information collected through this site.
Under POPIA, the head of an organisation is its Information Officer by default unless someone else is appointed and registered. Our Information Officer is:
We only collect personal information that you choose to give us directly, through two forms on this site:
Collects: full name, email, phone (optional), reason for contacting, and your message.
Purpose: to respond to your enquiry, prayer request, or visit/event question. Submissions are processed through Netlify Forms.
Collects: full name, email, giving amount and the fund you're giving toward.
Purpose: to record and acknowledge your gift. Card and banking details are never collected on this site directly — completing a gift redirects you to our payment provider's own secure payment page, which has its own privacy policy.
We do not use tracking cookies or analytics on this site at present. If that changes (for example, if we add Google Analytics or embed sermon videos that set their own cookies), this policy and a cookie consent banner will be updated before those tools go live.
We process your information based on your consent — given when you voluntarily submit a form — and, for giving records, to meet our own legitimate financial record-keeping and, where applicable, tax reporting obligations.
This site is hosted on Netlify, a US-based company with global infrastructure. That means personal information submitted through our forms may be processed or stored outside South Africa, on servers operated by Netlify and protected by their security measures (encryption in transit and at rest). If you give online, your payment details are handled entirely by [EDIT: PayFast / Yoco / other provider], not by us.
We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We only share it with:
We will only disclose your information beyond this if required to by law.
[EDIT: e.g. "Contact form submissions are kept for as long as needed to respond to your enquiry, then deleted after [X months]. Giving records are kept for as long as required for our financial and tax record-keeping obligations."]
You have the right to:
To exercise any of these, contact our Information Officer above.
We take reasonable technical and organisational steps to protect your information, including encrypted (HTTPS) connections across the whole site and spam-filtering on our forms. No system is completely risk-free — if a data breach ever affects your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as required by law.
We may update this policy as the site grows — for example, if we add online payments, analytics, or a members' area. The "last updated" date at the top will always reflect the latest version.
Contact our Information Officer using the details in Section 2, or visit our Contact page.