Privacy Policy

Our goal is to leverage technology to help people take their next step with Jesus. The Arrowhead Church app and our websites are tools we offer to serve our attenders and visitors by connecting them to one another and equipping them.

We're also passionate about serving pastors and church leaders around the world to help build the "capital C" Church. Leaders can download our free resources, trainings, and apps to grow their church and reach more people for Christ.

This Policy Is Meant to Be as Transparent as Possible

Every digital product and service we provide is created with great care and intentionality — each one designed to help more people pursue a deeper relationship with God in a safe and secure manner. We craft these tools as an act of ministry to serve you, and you have choices in your experience. You choose what you access. You choose what you share, and with whom. Your data is yours. Arrowhead Church does not sell your information, nor will we share it with others without your consent.

Every aspect of Arrowhead Church's digital tools is completely free, with no strings attached and no advertising. Our intent is to remove every possible barrier so you're able to focus on getting to know God more intimately.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully — it explains how we collect, use, share, and process your personal information. By using Arrowhead Church sites and services, you agree to this Privacy Policy and its terms.

If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, reach us by mail at 4101 Maple Valley Road, Morristown, TN 37813, or by email at hello@arrowhead.church.

Definitions

To make this document easier to read, we use some shorthand throughout. When we say "our sites" or "Arrowhead sites" (individually or collectively), we mean the websites and applications offered by Arrowhead Church — including our main site, arrowhead.church, and the congregation subdomains under it, such as morristown.arrowhead.church, greeneville.arrowhead.church, grainger.arrowhead.church, and kingsport.arrowhead.church — together with their content. These are owned and operated by Arrowhead Church, Inc., which we'll refer to as "Arrowhead," "Arrowhead Church," "us," or "we" throughout this policy. When we refer to persons interacting with Arrowhead Church, we'll use the term "you."

Brief Overview

This Privacy Policy outlines the types of data we collect from your interactions with Arrowhead Church and how we process that information. You have choices about how your personal information is accessed, collected, shared, and stored by Arrowhead, which we cover below. We take the privacy of the information you provide, and that we collect, seriously — and we implement security safeguards designed to protect your data.

In general, the information we collect depends on the services you request. Beyond personal information you provide directly (such as your name, email address, financial information, and other identifying details), we collect internet and network activity information through cookies and similar automated technologies, discussed below. We use the data we collect — along with inferences we draw from it — to:

• Provide, support, and personalize our sites and services

• Create, maintain, customize, and secure your Arrowhead Church profile, if you have one

• Process your requests and respond to your inquiries

• Share information about our products or services

• Maintain the safety, security, and integrity of Arrowhead Church

• Conduct internal development and analysis of our products and services

• Fulfill any other purpose for which you provided the information

Third-Party Services We Use

We use a handful of third-party services to help connect our church family to one another and to helpful resources. These providers are industry leaders in security, and — as explained below — they don't use your information for anything beyond what Arrowhead Church authorizes. As you provide information to us, some or all of it may flow between these providers. Importantly, none of these services collects information without your action: you provide it willingly, even if you don't know exactly where it's headed at that moment. Here's how each one is used:

Planning Center (our Church Management System)

What it's for: Planning Center is the hub for nearly everything we do administratively — managing attender data, groups, volunteers, event check-ins and sign-ups, event payments, and online giving. We also use it to communicate with Arrowhead attenders, such as parents of children in AKids or volunteers serving on a team. On the front end, you'll experience Planning Center through its app, Church Center — that's the interface you'll use to give, register, check in, and stay connected.

Planning Center also supports our internal ministry operations. This includes tracking a person's involvement in discipleship or care processes (what we call "workflows"), internal notes used for pastoral care, and custom fields we use to record ministry-relevant details. Access to sensitive notes and care-related information is restricted to a limited group — lead pastors, elders, and staff who have a direct need to know — rather than being visible church-wide.

If you serve on a ministry team, especially one involving children or students, we also run a background check through Checkr, a service integrated with Planning Center, as part of our standard safety process.

What data might be collected: Your contact information (name, phone, email, birthdate, address), your household members, financial information you provide for payments or donations, your Arrowhead-related activity, internal ministry notes and workflow status (for those in a care or discipleship process), and — for staff and volunteers — background check status.

How data is collected: Whenever you fill out an Arrowhead form, check in to an event, sign up for a group, or give to a fund (excluding anonymous donations) — including anything you enter through the Church Center app. Internal notes and workflow entries are created by our staff and elders as part of pastoral ministry, not by you directly.

YouTube

What it's for: We host our sermon and media library on YouTube, made accessible through the Church Center app. This lets you watch or revisit messages and other church media.

What data might be collected: If you're signed into a Google account while watching, YouTube may collect its own viewing and usage data under Google's privacy policy. We don't receive any personally identifying information about who's watching.

How data is collected: When you play a video hosted on YouTube, whether through the Church Center app or directly on YouTube.

Boxcast

What it's for: We use Boxcast to live stream our services, made accessible through the Church Center app.

What data might be collected: Anonymous data about how often our live streams are viewed.

How data is collected: When you watch a live stream through the Church Center app or on our website.

Clearstream

What it's for: We use Clearstream to provide texting for sign-ups, communication, and forms, and to text groups of people who want to stay in the loop about specific Arrowhead activities (like a reminder for an event you signed up for).

What data might be collected: Your contact information (name, phone, email).

How data is collected: Whenever you text our provided phone number or submit a corresponding contact form.

MailChimp

What it's for: We use MailChimp to email Arrowhead-connected people church news, resources, and updates we believe they'll be interested in. Our goal is to only email people who want to hear from us.

What data might be collected: Your contact information (name, phone, email).

How data is collected: Whenever you request email updates, or through engagement logged in Planning Center (like joining a Bible study group).

Your Profile and Information You Provide to Us

We collect personal data from you when you provide it to us, both offline and online. You don't need to provide personal information to use Arrowhead sites, but we allow you to create a profile — through Church Center — so we can tailor our sites and services to you. To create a profile, we ask for your first and last name, email address, and a password to authenticate you. Beyond that, you choose what additional information to share — such as your zip code, family members' names, gender, or marital status — all stored in association with your profile.

If you have a profile, the information you provide is generally stored in Planning Center, our church management system. We use this to authenticate you and give you access to your profile. We also create profiles for offline purposes, including volunteer applications and employment inquiries. We may combine information from your profile and site interactions with information from other Arrowhead sites, services, and products — along with inferences we draw from it — for internal development aimed at improving the overall quality of our sites, services, and products.

First-Time Guests

If you fill out a first-time guest card — whether in person or online — we'll create a profile for you in Planning Center so we can follow up. Providing your information as a guest is entirely voluntary; no one is required to fill out a guest card to attend or participate at Arrowhead. If you do choose to share it, you're giving us permission to reach out about your experience and any next steps for getting involved. We'll never harass you about this, and if you ever let us know you'd rather not be contacted, we'll stop right away.

Posts in Groups

Arrowhead doesn't run a public forum or comment section. But within Church Center, Groups allows you to post a message to your group or reply to others in it — and prayer requests you submit through an Arrowhead form are routed the same way, through Planning Center, rather than posted anywhere public.

We expect everyone using these features to engage with biblical character. Arrowhead is not liable for what another person chooses to post, but we do moderate: our staff reviews content that's flagged or brought to our attention and will remove anything inappropriate. This isn't automatic — it depends on someone noticing or reporting a post — so if you ever see something that needs our attention, please let us know.

Partner Directory

Verified Arrowhead partners may receive an invitation to join the Partner Directory inside Church Center. Joining is entirely voluntary, and only partners who choose to opt in are listed — so the directory is not a complete list of everyone at Arrowhead. Each partner decides what information appears in their listing. Email addresses and phone numbers are never shown. Partners may optionally turn on a "Message" feature, which lets other partners reach them through Church Center without exposing their personal contact information.

This feature is meant to help our church family stay connected, not to be used for solicitation, harassment, or anything outside that purpose. If we discover it's being misused, we reserve the right to revoke a partner's access to the Directory or the Message feature at any time.

Children's Privacy

Ministries like AKids and YTH involve children and students. For younger children in AKids, a parent or guardian checks them in and submits their information directly. Students in YTH often check themselves in and may attend without a parent or guardian present — but regardless of who checks a student in, we always require guardian contact information on file before a minor can participate in our ministries. Parents and guardians can contact us at any time to review, update, or remove their child's or student's information.

Giving

If you choose to give through Church Center, Planning Center's giving tools handle the transaction — collecting your payment information, the fund or campus you're designating your gift to, and personal information such as your name, address, phone number, and/or email address to ensure your gift is applied correctly and to provide you with an annual giving statement for tax purposes. Payments themselves are processed through Stripe, Planning Center's payment processor, so your card or bank information is handled directly by Stripe rather than stored by us. This information is stored in connection with your Planning Center profile. Within Planning Center, only a small group of administrators at Arrowhead Church has access to your giving history. We do not separately store or process your financial information outside of Planning Center and Stripe. For details on how Planning Center and Stripe handle your data, you can review their privacy policies directly.

Data Retention and Removal

We currently retain profile and activity data indefinitely, so we can maintain an accurate picture of our church family over time. If you stop attending or leave the church, we mark your profile as inactive rather than deleting it outright.

If you'd like your personal information fully removed, you can contact us at the information above and we'll honor that request — with one exception: giving records must be retained for at least seven years, in keeping with standard IRS audit and recordkeeping guidance, even if the rest of your profile is removed.

Automatic Data Collection Technologies

We check the IP address of visitors to our sites, and if it appears you're near one of our congregations, we may direct you to that congregation's subdomain. IP addresses aren't very precise, though — they change constantly and can only tell us roughly what region someone's connecting from, sometimes off by dozens or even hundreds of miles. We don't collect GPS data or your specific address through this process.

In most cases, when you use an Arrowhead website, we collect some general information about your device — standard for any web usage. This may include your IP address, operating system, web browser, device type, and internet or mobile carrier.

Communications From Us to You

From time to time, we may contact you as described below. You can opt out of certain communications by adjusting your app settings (where applicable), replying to a text with the word "STOP”, or by contacting us using the information above. If you ever tell us you'd rather not be contacted, we'll honor that and stop right away.

Recommendations and general information

We use the data we have about you, and inferences drawn from it, to recommend content, functionality, and additional products or services. We may reach out through push notification, email, mail, or in-app messages to share these recommendations, offer guidance on using our sites, or share other news.

Giving

If you've given to us, we use that data to keep you informed of your gift's impact, and we may periodically reach out about additional giving opportunities to another program, campus, or purpose — through push notification, email, mail, or in-app messages.

Security, legal, and technical issues

We use your personal information to respond to and resolve technical issues and complaints, and as necessary for security purposes or to investigate possible fraud, violations of law or agreement, or attempts to harm oneself or others. We may contact you about accounts, security, legal, or other service-related issues. These messages are not optional — you cannot opt out of them.

Notice

We may use your personal information to provide notice of a security incident or data breach by: (i) emailing the address you provided; (ii) posting to a public-facing page of an Arrowhead site or through an in-app message; (iii) using major statewide media; and/or (iv) telephonic means, including calls and text messages, potentially through automated dialers (standard text and data rates may apply). Email notices are effective when sent; posted notices are effective upon posting; in-app notices are effective when made; and telephonic notices are effective when transmitted or dialed. By using Arrowhead sites and services, you consent to receiving electronic communications from us related to your use and access of those services. Please keep your email address and other contact information current with us so we can reach you.

Analytics and Performance

We analyze the personal data available to us and how content is used across our sites. In some cases, we work with trusted third parties to do this research, under controls designed to protect your privacy. We may disclose usage statistics in aggregated, de-identified, and anonymized form — data that doesn't reveal any particular person or their personally identifying information. For example, we might report overall usage of a site worldwide or in a specific region.

We also use de-identified, aggregate data to market our sites, including communications promoting membership and network growth. Whenever we share growth statistics publicly, we present them in aggregated form to protect your identity and personal information. We use this data — along with public feedback and inferences drawn from it — for internal research and development, aimed at improving your overall experience on Arrowhead sites, measuring site performance, and growing engagement with our sites and their features.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as our ministry, tools, or legal obligations change. When we do, we'll update the date at the top of this page. If a change is significant, we'll do our best to make it known through our website or app rather than relying on the date alone. Continued use of Arrowhead sites after an update means you accept the revised policy.