Last updated: October 7, 2026

Who we are

St. Verena American Coptic Orthodox Church, 5240 Edmondson Pike, Nashville, TN 37211. Questions about this policy can be sent to [email protected].

The website

You can read this website without an account and without giving us any personal information. A few optional features ask for some, and each is described below. We do not run advertising or tracking cookies. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, keeps standard server logs (such as IP address, browser type, and pages requested) for security and reliability; we do not use them to identify visitors.

The contact form

The Contact page has a form for writing to the church. If you use it, we receive what you enter: your name, your email address, the subject and your message, with the time you sent it. It is emailed to [email protected] through an email delivery service, and a copy is kept on this site. The people who read that mailbox and the church's administrators (the priests and the few people they have appointed to look after the website) can read it; the administrators also get a notification that shows your name and the subject. We use it only to answer you. The copy on this site is deleted after 180 days; the email stays in the church's mailbox like any other email. To limit misuse, the site counts for one hour how many messages come from one internet address; that count is not kept with your message. To have a message deleted sooner, email [email protected].

The mobile app

The St. Verena Nashville app shows the same content as this website. If you allow notifications, your phone gives the app a push notification token (a random identifier issued by Apple or Google). We store that token so we can send you parish notifications, and nothing else is attached to it: no name, email, phone number, or location (unless you ask to join the servants group, below). Tokens that stop working are deleted automatically. You can stop notifications at any time in your phone's Settings, or by deleting the app.

Servants group (optional)

One part of the app, Servant's Corner, is for people who serve. To use it, you ask for access in the app by entering your first and last name. What happens with that name:

• Who sees it. The church's administrators: the priests and the few people they have appointed to look after the app. When you ask, they receive a notification on their phones that includes your name, and they see it in the list of requests and of servants. Nobody else sees it.
• What we store. Your name, the date, and whether you are waiting, approved, declined or removed, together with your phone's notification token (the random identifier described above). If you are approved, your phone can open Servant's Corner and receives the servants' notifications.
• How long. A request that is declined is deleted after one week; one that is never answered, after six months. If you leave the group in the app (More, Notifications), your name is deleted from the group. If an administrator removes you, we keep your name with your phone's identifier so the phone is not added again by mistake. If the app is deleted from your phone, your name and any request kept for that phone are deleted once a notification can no longer be delivered to it; a note that the phone was removed, without your name, is kept for about 13 months from the removal.
• What stays after you leave. The church keeps a record of which administrator approved, declined, removed or restored whom, with the names, for about 13 months. Weekly safety copies of the group lists are kept for 8 weeks. Both are seen only by the person who looks after the site.

To have your name deleted from all of these sooner, email [email protected].

The separate "site alerts" group, for the few people who look after the website, is joined with your name and a passcode; the same rules apply to it.

Notification topics (Youth, Sunday School, Choir, Deacons, Feasts and fasts) are simple switches: turning one on stores only that choice with your phone's notification token, never a name.

The app does not collect your location, contacts, photos, or usage analytics.

Services we link to

Some pages send you to services run by other organizations, for example online giving (PayPal), forms (Google Forms and Jotform), appointment booking (Google Calendar), and videos (YouTube). Those services have their own privacy policies, and anything you enter there goes to them, not to us. Embedded YouTube videos may set YouTube's cookies when you play them. When you play an Into the Deep episode in the app, the audio comes straight from the podcast's host (Spotify), which sees your phone's internet address like any website you visit.

Children

This website and app are meant for general parish use and do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with an updated date.