Legal

Privacy Policy.

Last updated: September 21, 2026

Riverside Lighthouse Church (“we”, “us”) runs this website. This page explains what information the site collects, why, and what you can ask us to do with it.

What we collect

Information you send us

  • Contact form — your name, email address, phone number (optional), subject and message.
  • Prayer request form — your name, email address, phone number (optional), your prayer request, and which of three sharing choices you selected: keep it with church staff only, share it with the prayer chain, or share it with the prayer chain without your name attached.

Church staff may add private notes to a prayer request to help them follow up. Those notes are never shown publicly.

Information collected automatically

Like almost every website, the servers of our web host record basic technical details of each visit — such as your IP address, browser type and the page you asked for — for security and troubleshooting. Our site also uses your IP address for about five minutes after you submit a form, only to stop the forms being flooded with spam.

We do not use advertising or analytics trackers, and we never sell your information or share it with anyone for marketing.

How we use it

When you send a message or a prayer request, it is emailed to the church office and stored on our website so staff can respond and follow up. Only church staff and our website administrator, each with a password-protected admin account, can see submissions.

When you submit a prayer request, you choose one of three options for how it may be shared:

  • Keep this between me and the church staff — your request stays with staff only.
  • Share with the prayer chain — church staff may share your request, including your name, with the prayer chain (a group of members who commit to pray for submitted requests) — for example in a prayer meeting or on a prayer list.
  • Share with the prayer chain, but not my name — church staff may share your request with the prayer chain without identifying you by name.

This sharing is done offline, by hand, by church staff. Nothing you submit is published on this website or sent out automatically — there is no prayer wall and no mailing list.

Where it is kept, and for how long

Our website is hosted by DreamHost. So that the site can be restored after a failure, an encrypted backup of it is made every night and stored on DreamHost’s cloud storage.

We keep messages and prayer requests only as long as they are needed for pastoral follow-up. You can ask us to delete yours at any time: we remove it from the website straight away, and the copies in our encrypted backups are deleted automatically within about four months.

Cookies

Our site sets two small cookies that it needs to work: a session cookie, and a security token that protects our forms against forgery. Both expire after two hours. We do not use analytics or advertising cookies.

Content from other services

Some parts of the site come from other companies. When your browser loads them, those companies receive your IP address, and their own privacy policies apply.

  • Sermon videos are played through YouTube in its privacy-enhanced mode. YouTube (Google) may store its own cookies or similar data on your device, particularly once you play a video.
  • Sermon thumbnails on our sermons page are loaded from YouTube’s image servers.
  • The map on our About page is provided by Google Maps.
  • Our fonts are provided by Google Fonts.

Links to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and our online giving provider take you to those websites, and their privacy policies apply once you are there.

Children

This site is not directed at children. We ask that anyone under 13 not send personal information through these forms. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has done so, contact us and we will delete it.

Seeing, correcting or deleting your information

To see what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted, contact the church office:

Changes to this policy

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