Privacy Policy

Introduction

Lake Palestine United Methodist Church ("LPUMC," "we," "us," or "our") respects your privacy and is committed to protecting the personal information you share with us. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard information when you visit our website at lakepalestineumc.com.

Information We Collect

We collect information that you voluntarily provide through our contact form, including your name, email address, phone number, and message content. We do not collect information automatically through cookies or tracking technologies beyond what is necessary for basic website functionality.

How We Use Your Information

The personal information you provide through our contact form is used solely to respond to your inquiry, prayer request, or message. We may also use your information to send you information about church events or ministries if you have specifically requested it.

Information Sharing

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer your personal information to outside parties. Your information may be shared only with church staff and volunteers as necessary to respond to your inquiry or provide the services you have requested.

Third-Party Services

Our website connects to or embeds content from the following third-party services. Each has its own privacy policy, and we encourage you to review them. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these services.

• YouTube — Sermon videos are embedded via the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain, which does not set tracking cookies until you start a video. Sermon thumbnails are loaded from img.youtube.com.
• YouTube channel feed — Our sermon list is fetched server-side from the public YouTube channel RSS feed and cached for 15 minutes. Your IP address is not sent to YouTube when you load the sermon page.
• Google Maps — The location map on our Home and Contact pages is provided by Google Maps via an embedded iframe. Google may set cookies and collect information about your visit per its own privacy policy.
• Tithe.ly — Online giving is processed by Tithe.ly. The giving widget is loaded only on our Giving page. Card and bank information is collected directly by Tithe.ly — we never see or store it.
• Google Fonts — Web fonts (Cormorant Garamond and Source Sans 3) are currently served from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, which may receive your IP address as part of the standard request.
• Contact Form 7 — Form submissions are processed by the WordPress Contact Form 7 plugin and emailed to the church. Submissions are not stored in the WordPress database by default.
• Facebook — We link to our Facebook page from the header, footer, and several content pages. Clicking those links sends you to Facebook’s own site. We do not embed Facebook content directly on this site.

We do not currently use Google Analytics, the Meta Pixel, or any other behavioral-tracking or advertising scripts on this website.

Online Giving

Online giving is processed through Tithe.ly, a secure third-party payment platform. We do not co