Pastor Echoes is operated by Unbalanced Force Dynamics, LLC ("UF," "we"). This policy explains what information the Service does and does not handle, for both church members ("Members") and church pastors/staff ("Authorized Users").
The public Valley of Echoes is built to require no Member identity:
Pastors and staff sign in with Google; we do not create or store passwords. For Authorized Users we hold a name, email, role, and church association to operate their account, plus a session cookie to keep them signed in. Per-pastor research and planning workspaces are private to that pastor.
A church delivers its own sermon library to us (see Library Delivery in the Terms of Service). We turn it into transcripts, summaries, search indices, outlines, and Echoes ("Derived Data"). This processing runs through a multi-stage pipeline on our own on-premises hardware, using models we operate in-house — speech recognition, transcript cleanup, enrichment, clip selection, and text embeddings.
Sermon content is preaching the church itself publishes to its congregation; this policy concerns personal information, of which the member experience collects essentially none.
Pastor Echoes stores and serves a church's sermon video and audio on our own infrastructure. When a Member presses play, the video is delivered by us — not by a third-party video platform. This is a deliberate privacy decision, and it means:
An Echo is a start and end time inside a sermon, not a separate file: the player seeks to the moment and stops at the end. We do not republish a church's sermons anywhere else, and we do not show one church's content to another church.
People who appear in the recordings. A sermon recording may show or record people other than the preacher — worship teams, guests, and members of the congregation. That footage is the church's recording; we host and process it on the church's behalf and at the church's direction. The church is responsible for the permissions and releases covering the people in its recordings (Terms of Service, Content Warranty). A church can unpublish or delete any sermon from the Service at any time; if you appear in a recording and want it addressed, contact your church, and you may also contact us at the address in Section 16.
To transcribe preaching accurately, the Service keeps a small, church-scoped list of names and places that recur in that church's sermons — pastors and staff, ministry and campus names, and, where a church chooses to add them, the first names of a pastor's family or other people he names from the pulpit. Without these, an automatic transcriber misspells them.
We use a small set of providers to run the Service, for example: cloud storage, hosting, and content-delivery for the sermon media we serve; a secure file-transfer destination used only to receive a church's library during onboarding, and cleared afterwards; Google (staff sign-in only); a payment processor for church billing (not Members); and an email provider for church correspondence. These providers handle data only to provide their function. We do not use a third-party video platform to serve sermons to Members, and AI processing of sermon content is performed in-house on our own hardware, not by a third-party AI provider (see Section 6).
The Service is directed to churches and general audiences, not to children, and the member experience collects no personal information from anyone — there are no member accounts. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Where a church's own sermon recording happens to show children (for example, a congregation shot), that footage is the church's content, governed by Section 7.
We do not sell personal information. A church sees its own aggregate, anonymous engagement and any voluntary "reach out" requests its Members submit. Each church's content, media, and data are isolated from other churches. We do not show one church's sermons to another church, and we do not use a church's media to promote anyone but that church — unless the church gives us separate, written, revocable permission (for example, agreeing to be shown as a reference example).
We use industry-standard measures to protect information, including encrypted connections, encryption of stored media, and per-church data isolation. Sermon media is generally reviewed before it is made available for playback, though we do not monitor all content and cannot guarantee detection of every issue. No system is perfectly secure, but the member-facing design minimizes risk by collecting almost no personal data in the first place.
Aggregate engagement counts and Derived Data are retained as part of the Service. Device-local favorites live only on your device. Voluntary reach-out requests are delivered to and retained by the church you contacted.
Sermon media. We keep the sermon video and audio a church has delivered for as long as the church subscribes. If the church cancels, we stop serving it and may hold the stored copy for a limited period so a returning church need not re-deliver its whole library. A church may ask us to delete its sermon media at any time, and we will remove it from our active systems within a commercially reasonable period, subject to routine backup cycles and any retention required by law. We are not a backup service; churches keep their own master copies.
We may update this policy; material changes will be reflected by the version and date above.
Unbalanced Force Dynamics, LLC · support@pastorechoes.com