This Privacy Policy explains what information SermonWave ("SermonWave", "we", "us") collects when you use the SermonWave website, dashboard, listener pages, our capture devices and the church directory (together, the "Service"), and how we use, share and protect it. It covers church account users, listeners, churches listed in our directory, and visitors to sermonwave.com. Our Terms of Service govern use of the Service.
1. Who we are
SermonWave provides live transcription and translation for churches. We are based in the United States and we run the Service on our own servers. We are a small team; we do not have a data protection officer, and we do not hold SOC 2, ISO 27001 or any similar certification. We say so plainly so you can judge the Service on what it actually is.
You can reach us any time at team@serve.love or (918) 283-0005, or through our contact page. For account and support questions you can also use team@sermonwave.com.
2. Information we collect
Church accounts
- Account information: your name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), role, and the users you invite.
- Church profile: church name, address, city, time zone, website, logo, service times, social links, speaker names and photos, and other details you enter or ask us to fill in automatically.
- Billing information: your plan, add-ons, subscription status and invoices. Stripe collects and stores your payment card details; we do not receive or store full card numbers. If we ship you hardware we also collect a shipping name, address and phone number.
- Customer content: sermon and service audio captured by your web device, your SermonWave hardware device or the OBS plugin, and the recordings, transcripts, translations, synthesized translated audio, summaries, quotes, outlines and images created from it.
- Voice samples: if you use the voice add-on, short samples of a speaker's voice taken from sermon audio, used to generate translated audio that resembles that speaker.
- Device information: device identifiers and keys, status, audio levels, software version, network information and diagnostic logs, used to keep devices running and to support you.
- Usage information: sign-in times, pages and features used in the dashboard, and IP address and browser information for security and troubleshooting.
Listeners
- No account needed. Listeners can use listener pages without giving a name or email.
- Listener identifier and preferences: a random identifier and your preferences (language, theme, audio on/off, listening history) are kept in your browser's local storage so the page remembers you.
- Listening sessions: which church, event and language you listened to, when, and your device type (mobile, tablet or desktop). We store a one-way hash of your IP address rather than the address itself. We also send your IP address to a geolocation service to estimate your approximate city and region, which appear in aggregated listener statistics and maps for churches.
- Location for "near me": if you use the church finder's "use my location" button, your browser asks your permission to share your location. It is used only to find nearby churches and we do not keep it.
- What you choose to send: if you submit a prayer request, a contact request or a search, we collect what you enter and share it with the church you sent it to.
Website visitors and the directory
- Information you submit through our contact, signup, subscribe, claim or removal-request forms.
- Analytics about how the site is used (pages visited, referring site, approximate location, device and browser), collected with Google Analytics.
- Signals collected by Google reCAPTCHA to protect our forms from spam and abuse.
- Information about churches in our directory, including churches that have not signed up. Section 8 explains this in full.
3. How we use information
- to provide the Service: live captions, translation and translated audio, archives, summaries, search, podcast feeds, and church and sermon pages;
- to create and manage accounts, run free trials, process payments and ship devices;
- to send service emails, such as your welcome email, trial reminders, receipts and important notices;
- to give churches aggregated listener statistics;
- to run and improve the church directory, and to handle claims and removal requests;
- to monitor, secure, debug and improve the Service;
- to respond to your questions and support requests; and
- to comply with law and enforce our Terms of Service.
We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use customer content for advertising.
4. Legal bases
If the UK or EU GDPR applies to you, we rely on these legal bases:
- Contract: to provide the Service to a church that has signed up, and to bill for it.
- Legitimate interests: to keep the Service secure and working, to produce aggregated statistics, and to publish the church directory from public information. Where we rely on legitimate interests we have weighed them against your rights, and you can object (see section 12).
- Consent: for optional things you turn on, such as marketing emails, browser location and optional analytics cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Legal obligation: to keep billing and tax records and to respond to lawful requests.
For sermon audio and anything made from it, the church is normally the controller and we act as its processor. See section 17.
5. How AI processing works
Speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech and sermon summaries run on AI servers that SermonWave owns and operates in the United States. Sermon audio, transcripts and translations are not sent to third-party AI providers for processing. Audio travels from your device to our servers over encrypted connections.
Processing audio means: we convert speech to text, translate that text into the languages your church has chosen, and generate spoken audio of the translation. If you use the voice add-on, we also generate audio designed to resemble the speaker's own voice. Each of these steps creates a new copy of the content, which is stored with your account.
One exception: if you use the optional church profile auto-fill in the dashboard, we send your church name, location and the text of your church's public website to a third-party AI provider (Anthropic) to draft your profile. No sermon content is sent. You can skip auto-fill and enter your profile by hand.
We do not use your audio, transcripts, translations or other content to train or tune AI models, and we do not provide it to others for that purpose.
AI output can be wrong. Transcripts and translations may contain errors, including in names, scripture references and theological terms. Do not rely on them where accuracy is critical.
6. Recording in your sanctuary
SermonWave captures audio from the room. That audio can include the preacher, worship leaders, people reading or praying aloud, and congregants near a microphone. What people say out loud in a service can be personal and sometimes sensitive.
The church decides what to record and is responsible for telling people about it. If you run a church account, you are responsible for giving whatever notice and obtaining whatever consent the law where you are requires — for example a sign at the door, a line in the bulletin, a verbal announcement, or a consent form for speakers whose voice you clone. Recording laws vary by state and country, and some places require everyone's consent. We cannot give you legal advice about your jurisdiction.
If you are a congregant or a speaker and you want a recording of yourself removed, ask your church first, because the church controls its own content. You may also contact us at team@serve.love and we will pass the request on and help where we can.
7. Public pages
Churches choose whether each sermon is public, unlisted or private. Public sermons, including transcripts, translations, summaries and audio, appear on church and sermon pages, may be listed in sitemaps, and may be indexed by search engines and AI assistants. Unlisted sermons can be viewed by anyone with the link. Private sermons are visible only to the church's dashboard users.
If your church turns on a SermonWave podcast feed, the public sermons you include in it are published as an RSS feed that anyone can subscribe to, together with their audio and transcripts. Translated episodes carry a spoken and written notice that the voice is AI-generated.
Once a page has been public, search engines and other third parties may keep copies after a sermon is made private or deleted. We cannot control how long those copies remain.
8. The church directory
We publish a free directory of churches at sermonwave.com/churches. A church can appear in it without having signed up, so this section explains exactly what we do and how to get out. It applies as the directory is rolled out; if your church is not listed, nothing in this section applies to you.
Why a church appears
We build listings from public information: open datasets (including Overture Maps, OpenStreetMap and the IRS Exempt Organizations file, which contains a church's legal name, EIN and mailing address), the church's own public website, and the church's own public podcast feed. Every listing says it was compiled from public sources and that the church is not affiliated with SermonWave unless it is marked Claimed. We publish the directory on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing a useful, free, accurate index of churches, and we give every church an easy way to object.
What we collect — and what we deliberately do not
- We collect organisational facts: church name, address, phone, website, service times, denomination, social and sermon links, and a logo.
- We deliberately do not collect personal staff emails or phone numbers, staff or member lists, member names, or photos of people. Our crawler skips prayer-request and children's-ministry pages. It identifies itself honestly, obeys
robots.txt, pauses between requests and revisits at most twice a year. - Preachers' names. Where a sermon is published by the church with the preacher's name on it, we show that name on the sermon page as the church published it, so the credit is accurate. If you are a preacher and you do not want your name shown, tell us and we will remove it.
Sermons in the directory
To show what the product does, we may take a church's newest sermons from its own public podcast feed or website, transcribe them, and publish the transcript with full credit to the church. For these listings we do not translate the sermon, generate synthetic speech or clone anyone's voice. We never download anything from YouTube. Every directory sermon page credits the church by name and links to the original ("Sermon by [church]. Original: [link]"). Credit always goes to the church, never to SermonWave.
Claiming a listing
Any church can take over its own listing free at /churches/claim/{church}/. We verify that you represent the church — usually with a code emailed to an address at the church's own domain — and then the listing becomes your account, with a 14-day free trial. Claiming is free and does not require payment.
Removal and corrections
Every listing and directory sermon page has a Request removal link, at /churches/remove/{church}/. You can ask us to remove the listing and all sermons, remove the sermons only, or correct the information. A person reviews every request, usually within 7 days. You can also email team@serve.love.
When we remove a listing we unpublish the profile and every sermon we made from it, delete the stored audio and transcripts, and add the church to a suppression list so a later crawl does not add it back. We keep a minimal record of the request itself so the removal stays permanent.
Who we exclude
The directory lists Christian congregations only. We do not list Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist, or Episcopal Church (TEC) congregations. These are scope decisions about which churches the Service is built for, not judgements about any faith. Listings never editorialise, and denominations are described neutrally.
9. Sharing and service providers
We share information only as described here. We do not sell it.
- With the church: listener statistics, and anything a listener chooses to send to a church.
- Service providers that process data for us:
- Stripe — payments, subscriptions and card data. SermonWave currently bills through the Stripe account of Serve.Love, the platform SermonWave is built alongside, so your card statement or receipt may show "Serve.Love", "SermonWave", or both, depending on how our payment processor labels the charge at the time.
- Google — Google Analytics (website analytics), reCAPTCHA (spam protection) and Google Fonts (web fonts, which means your browser requests a font file from Google when you load our marketing site).
- Anthropic — church profile auto-fill only, as described in section 5.
- ip-api.com — approximate city and region from a listener's IP address.
- Email delivery — we send email from our own mail server at sermonwave.com, with SMTP.com as a fallback relay if our own server cannot deliver a message.
- Shipping carriers — delivery of hardware.
We host the Service, store its files and run its AI on our own servers in the United States. Our map tiles are self-hosted, so loading a map does not tell any third-party map provider where you are. We do not use SermonWave to send you SMS or automated voice calls.
- If a church publishes to other platforms: when a church chooses to publish its sermons to a podcast app or another platform, the content it publishes goes to that platform and is then governed by that platform's own terms and privacy policy. If a church admin connects YouTube in the dashboard, our servers use that connection to upload the sermons the church chooses to publish, and to create, check and end the church's live broadcasts when the church streams with our OBS plugin, as described in section 10. The video of a live broadcast itself goes from your church's own computer to YouTube; it does not pass through our servers.
- Legal reasons: when required by law or legal process, or to protect the rights, safety and property of our users, the public or SermonWave.
- Business transfers: as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, under this policy's protections.
- With your consent or at your direction.
10. YouTube
Connecting YouTube is optional. A church admin can connect the church's YouTube channel in the dashboard under Settings. Once it is connected, the church can publish chosen sermons to that channel, and, if the church streams with our OBS plugin, SermonWave can run the church's live broadcasts. Here is what that involves.
- What we access. When you connect, Google asks you to allow SermonWave to see, edit and delete your YouTube videos and captions. That is the single permission YouTube offers for running live broadcasts, and it is the only one we request. We use it only to: create and run a live broadcast and live stream for each language your church streams with our OBS plugin, and end them when the service ends; upload the sermons your church chooses to publish; set the title, description, language, privacy and captions of the videos we created for you; and read your channel's name, ID and picture so the dashboard can show which channel is connected. A new upload is private unless you choose otherwise.
- About the delete permission. The permission Google asks for also allows deleting videos, because YouTube does not offer a narrower one that can create live broadcasts. SermonWave never deletes a video. Our software contains no instruction to delete anything on your channel, and we test for that on every change so it stays true. If a live broadcast we created never actually went live, we end it rather than remove it; it stays on your channel for you to delete if you want to.
- What we upload. For each sermon you publish, we make a video from the sermon's audio and its cover image on our own servers and send it to your channel. We do not upload anything you have not asked us to publish.
- Live broadcasts. For each translated language your church streams, our server creates a broadcast on your channel with the title and privacy setting you chose, gives your streaming computer the stream address and stream key for that broadcast, checks whether it is live, and ends it after the service. The video and the captions go from your church's own computer straight to YouTube. We keep the broadcast and stream IDs and their status; we do not store stream keys.
- What we do not do. We do not delete or change videos we did not create for you, and we do not read your playlists, comments, subscribers or analytics. We do not download anything from YouTube.
- What we store. Your channel's name, ID and picture link, the permission you allowed, a record of each sermon you published (title, description, privacy setting, video ID and status), a record of each live broadcast we created for you (its IDs, title, privacy, status and times), and the access and refresh tokens Google gives us. The tokens are encrypted on our servers, with a key that is kept separate from our database, and are used only for the purposes listed above. We also check at least once a day that your connection is still allowed. If you remove SermonWave's access in your Google account, we delete the stored tokens as soon as we notice (within a day) and the rest of your YouTube information within 30 days.
- Disconnecting. You can disconnect at any time in the dashboard under Settings. We then ask Google to revoke our access and delete the stored tokens. You can also remove SermonWave's access from your Google account at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Videos already on YouTube stay on your channel until you remove them there.
- YouTube's and Google's terms. By connecting YouTube you also agree to the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google handles your information under the Google Privacy Policy.
SermonWave's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
11. Cookies and local storage
- Dashboard: a session cookie keeps you signed in. It is required for the dashboard to work.
- Listener pages: local storage in your browser keeps your listener identifier and preferences. You can clear it at any time in your browser settings; the page will then treat you as a new listener.
- Marketing site: Google Analytics and reCAPTCHA set cookies or read device signals. You can block cookies in your browser or use Google's opt-out tools. Blocking reCAPTCHA may stop our signup and contact forms from working.
We honour Global Privacy Control (GPC) and similar opt-out preference signals where the law requires it.
12. Retention and deletion
We would rather tell you how this really works than quote a tidy number we do not enforce.
- Customer content is kept while your account is active, or until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry by default: if you do nothing, your recordings, transcripts and translations stay available to you.
- Optional automatic deletion. We can set a retention window on your account — for example, delete recordings older than 90 days — and a scheduled job then deactivates and deletes those files. Ask us if you want one; it is off unless you request it.
- Deleting a sermon removes it from your dashboard and your public pages. The underlying audio files are then purged from our storage by a scheduled cleanup job, which runs hourly and removes files that nothing active refers to and that are at least 7 days old.
- Closing an account: contact us and we will delete your customer content. We will export it for you first if you ask. We may keep a copy in backups for a limited period before it is overwritten.
- Listener session records are kept to produce statistics for churches, and are deleted or aggregated when no longer needed for that purpose.
- Directory listings that are removed are suppressed permanently, as described in section 8.
- Billing records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires.
13. Your rights and how to use them
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete or export your personal information, to object to or restrict processing, and to withdraw consent.
How to make a request: email team@serve.love or use our contact page, and tell us what you want. Church account owners should write from the email address on the account. We may need to verify your identity before we act, and we will not charge you for a routine request. We aim to respond within 30 days, and within 45 days where U.S. state law sets that period.
- Church users: you can view and change your account and profile in the dashboard, change a sermon's visibility, and delete sermons yourself.
- Listeners: clear your browser's local storage to reset your listener identifier. To have something you sent a church deleted, contact that church, or contact us and we will help.
- Churches in the directory: use the Request removal link on your listing, as described in section 8.
- Marketing email: use the unsubscribe link in the email. We will still send essential service emails such as billing notices.
If the UK or EU GDPR applies to you, you may also complain to your data protection authority. If you are in the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.
14. U.S. state privacy rights
If you live in California or another U.S. state with a comprehensive privacy law, you may have the right to know what personal information we collect, to access or delete it, to correct it, to obtain a portable copy, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights.
- We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are used in the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA. We therefore have no "do not sell or share my personal information" process to offer — there is nothing to opt out of. If that ever changes we will add one and say so here.
- Sensitive personal information. Sermon audio can reveal religious beliefs, and a listener's choice of language can suggest their background. We use this information only to provide the Service — to transcribe, translate and publish what a church asks us to, and to show that church its own statistics. We do not use or disclose it to infer characteristics about you, and we do not use it for advertising. We do not knowingly collect government identifiers, precise geolocation (beyond the city-level estimate described in section 2), health, biometric or financial account information.
- Authorised agents may make a request on your behalf with proof that you authorised them.
- Appeals. If we refuse your request and your state gives you a right of appeal, reply to our decision and a person will review it.
Categories of personal information we collect, the purposes, and who we disclose to are described in sections 2, 3 and 9. We disclose personal information to service providers for business purposes only.
15. Security
Here is what we actually do: connections to our website, dashboard and devices use TLS; passwords are stored only as hashes; device and API credentials are hashed or kept in the operating system's keychain on the device; access to production systems is restricted to the people who need it; our AI servers are on a private network and are not exposed to the internet; and listener IP addresses are hashed rather than stored.
What we do not claim: we have no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, no third-party penetration-test report we can share, and no cyber-insurance policy we are promising you. No system is completely secure. If a breach affects your personal information we will notify you and any regulator as the law requires.
16. Children
Church accounts are for adults (18+). Listener pages are for general audiences and do not ask for a name or contact details. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, or under the age set by local law. Churches should not submit children's personal information through the Service, and our directory crawler deliberately skips children's-ministry pages. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
Children may be audible in a recording of a service. That is the church's decision and the church's responsibility, as described in section 6.
17. Where data is processed
SermonWave is based in the United States, and we process and store data on our own servers in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the United States — including from the UK or the EU — your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may not provide the same level of protection as your home country.
Where the UK or EU GDPR applies to a transfer, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK Addendum) or another lawful transfer mechanism, together with the protections in this policy. Ask us if you need a copy of the relevant terms.
18. Churches and listeners
Each church decides what to record, what to publish, and what to collect from its congregation. For that content the church is the controller (or "business") and SermonWave processes it on the church's instructions to provide the Service. Churches are responsible for notices and consents in their own buildings, as described in section 6.
Listeners with questions about how a particular church uses their information should contact that church. We will help put you in touch.
19. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. We will post the new version on this page and change the "Last updated" date. If a change is material we will also notify account owners by email or in the dashboard before it takes effect.
This version replaces the policy dated 26 September 2026. It was rewritten to describe the church directory, the OBS plugin, podcast feeds, voice cloning and our real retention practices. On 14 October 2026 we added section 10 about connecting YouTube and publishing sermons to it, and later the same day we expanded it: SermonWave now also runs a church's YouTube live broadcasts from its own servers, which needs a broader YouTube permission, so section 10 describes that permission, what we do with it, and that we never delete a video.
20. Contact us
Privacy questions and requests:
team@serve.love
(918) 283-0005
sermonwave.com/contact
SermonWave
500 S. Lynn Riggs, PMB 299
Claremore, OK 74017