Terms of Service

By creating a ChurchOrb account or using any part of the ChurchOrb service (the mobile app, the web app at app.churchorb.com, the admin console, and any related APIs), you agree to these Terms of Service. Please read them together with our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle your information.

If you are using ChurchOrb on behalf of a church, organisation or any entity that is not you personally, you also confirm that you are authorised to bind that organisation to these terms.

• You must be at least thirteen years old to create an account. If you are under the age of legal majority in your country, please get permission from a parent or guardian first.
• Give us accurate information. Keep it up to date. Impersonating someone else or lying about who you are is not allowed.
• Look after your credentials. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including if someone else uses it because you shared a password or lost a device. Turn on biometric login or your device passcode to reduce risk.
• One account per person. Multiple people cannot share a single account.
• If you notice suspicious activity, tell us right away at security@churchorb.com.

ChurchOrb is multi-tenant. Each church has its own workspace, and your relationship to that workspace is defined by the role your church assigns you.

Owner

The person who originally created the workspace, or who was later handed ownership. There is exactly one Owner per church. The Owner is the only person who can delete the workspace or transfer ownership to someone else.

Church Admin

People the Owner or another admin has trusted with broad administrative powers, such as managing members, roles, giving, and settings. Admins cannot delete the workspace or transfer ownership.

Member

Everyone else in the church. Members can participate in chats, register for events, give, and access the content their church has made available to them.

As the Owner or an Admin of a workspace, you agree to only add members who have given you permission to do so, to handle their data responsibly, and to keep at least one Admin in the workspace at all times. We may reach out to Owners with important announcements about the service.

If you are a member of a workspace, your church controls the data you post inside their workspace. If you want to leave a workspace, you can do so from the app. Your account remains, and you can still be a member of other churches you belong to.

ChurchOrb is a place for church communities to serve each other. These things are not welcome, regardless of intent:

• Illegal activity, harassment, threats, doxxing, or anything that would put another person in danger.
• Content that sexualises minors, incites violence, promotes self-harm, or is otherwise deeply harmful.
• Hate speech, discrimination, or targeted abuse based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, religion or any other protected characteristic.
• Spam, scams, phishing, fraud, or any attempt to trick other members out of their money, credentials or personal data.
• Malware, viruses, or any code intended to damage devices or interfere with the service.
• Scraping, reverse engineering, decompiling, or trying to extract our source code, other churches' data, or any part of the platform you have not been given access to.
• Overloading the service (denial of service, uncontrolled bots, excessive automation) or bypassing rate limits.
• Using ChurchOrb to compete with us or build a substantially similar product.

If we discover any of the above, we may remove content, suspend the account or workspace involved, and, in serious cases, cooperate with the authorities.

ChurchOrb includes features where members can post content that other members can see, including chat messages, prayer requests, and profile information. We have zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive behaviour on those surfaces.

• You must not post content that is illegal, harassing, hateful, sexually exploitative, threatening, or otherwise harmful, as described in the Acceptable use section above.
• You must not use ChurchOrb to bully, stalk, impersonate, or target another member.
• You are responsible for what you post. If you would not say it to someone face-to-face in your church community, do not post it in the app.

Reporting and blocking. If you see content or behaviour that violates these standards, use the in-app Report option on the message, prayer request, or profile in question. You can also Block another member. Blocking immediately removes that person's content from your view in chat, prayer, and the member directory, and you will no longer receive notifications from them. When you block someone from a specific piece of content, we also notify your church's administrators and our moderation team so the report can be reviewed.

How we respond. We use automated filtering on some publish paths to block clearly prohibited language before it is posted. That filter is a supplement, not a substitute, for human review. Reports are reviewed by church administrators and ChurchOrb. We aim to review and act on reports of objectionable content within twenty-four hours, which may include removing the content and suspending or terminating the account of the person who posted it. In urgent cases involving safety or illegal activity, we may act immediately and cooperate with the authorities.

Church administrators with the appropriate permissions can also remove content and remove members from group chats. Those tools complement, but do not replace, member reporting.

You keep ownership of everything you post to ChurchOrb: chats, voice notes, photos, videos, sermons, notes, prayer requests and any other material. We call all of this “Your Content”.

To run the service, we need a limited licence from you. You grant ChurchOrb a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, transmit, transcode, back up, and display Your Content, purely so we can deliver the service to you and your church. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to the retention windows described in the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for making sure you have the right to post what you post. If you upload sermons, music, images or other third-party material, you must have the necessary permissions from the copyright owner.

We may remove content that violates these terms or that we believe in good faith puts the platform or its users at risk. Where possible we will tell you why.

ChurchOrb does not process payments or move money on your behalf. The Give screen inside the app simply displays the bank account details that your church has chosen to publish, so that you can copy them into your own bank app and transfer directly to the church.

• Any transfer you make is a transaction between you and your bank, and between your bank and your church's bank. ChurchOrb is not a party to it.
• We do not collect or store your card number, bank credentials, or any payment method details.
• Refunds, reconciliation, and giving statements are matters for your church. If you have a question about a specific gift, please contact the church you transferred to.
• If we introduce in-app payments in a future release, we will update these terms and notify you before you can use the new feature.

ChurchOrb integrates with third parties to provide sign-in (Google, Apple), notifications (Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, Apple Push Notification service), and hosting (Fly.io). Your use of those services is also governed by their own terms. We are not responsible for how third parties handle data outside of the ChurchOrb service, but we choose them carefully and we hold each to written data protection agreements.

ChurchOrb, our logo, our website, our apps, our source code, our documentation and everything we create to run the platform belong to us. We grant you a limited, personal, non-transferable licence to use them for the purpose of accessing the service. That licence does not include the right to copy, modify, redistribute or reverse engineer any part of the platform.

If you send us feedback, ideas or suggestions, thank you. We may use them without owing you anything, but we will never publicly attribute them to you without asking first.

You can stop using ChurchOrb at any time:

• Delete your account from the app. Your personal data will be removed subject to the retention rules in our Privacy Policy.
• If you are an Owner, delete the workspace from the admin console. This is a two-step, email-confirmed action that wipes the whole church workspace.

We may suspend or terminate access to your account or workspace if:

• You breach these terms and either cannot or will not fix the breach after a reasonable request.
• Continuing to serve the account creates legal risk for us or other users.
• The account has been inactive for a long time (typically twelve months) and we have written to you without a response.

Where we can, we will notify you before suspending or terminating, and we will give you a fair opportunity to export your data.

We work hard to make ChurchOrb reliable, but no online service is perfect. To the fullest extent allowed by law, ChurchOrb is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not warrant that:

• The service will always be available or free from bugs or security vulnerabilities.
• The service will meet your specific requirements or those of your church.
• Content posted by other users is accurate, safe or lawful.

If you rely on ChurchOrb for critical operations (for example giving reports for annual accounts), please keep your own backups.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, ChurchOrb is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive damages arising out of your use of the service. Our total liability to you for any and all claims relating to the service is capped at the greater of:

• The total amount you or your church paid us in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or
• One hundred United States dollars.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that applies, the exclusions and limits above apply only to the extent permitted by your local law.

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold ChurchOrb harmless from any claim, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) that arises out of your use of the service, your content, or your breach of these terms. We will let you know promptly if we receive such a claim and will cooperate in your defence.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising from these terms or the service will be brought exclusively in the courts of Lagos, Nigeria, unless we agree together to another venue in writing. Nothing in this section prevents you from bringing a claim in your local consumer court where the law grants you that right.

We may update these terms as the product changes. When we do, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. If a change is material, we will notify you inside the app or by email at least fourteen days before it takes effect, so you have time to review and, if you disagree, close your account.

Questions about these terms are best sent to:

Legal

legal@churchorb.com

Support

support@churchorb.com

We aim to reply to every message within two business days.