Who we are

Terrace Shores is a humble community of believers on beautiful Green Lake, Wisconsin. For over 70 years we have testified the works of God in our lives, striving to uphold our lives both presently and now online. To preserve the sanctity of human dignity, we are committed to the farthest reaches of privacy, confidentiality, sanctity, respect, and more, all in the name of the love of our Lord Jesus.

“TLDR,” or to put simply, we…

• Will not sell your data. Ever. This website is for our community and there will be wolves trying to access. We are trying to preserve. “Listen carefully: I am sending you out like sheep among wolves; so be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves” ~ Matthew 10:17
• Will not allow your data to be leaked. This is an honest attempt forthwith, but understand whatever data you provide, digitally, is forever vulnerable. We have sourced reputable third-party partners, and have Josiah (previous PK) on standby and mechanic to guard. Note that even as website administrators, if you give online or look someone up in our directory, we cannot see your card number or your password, ever. Nor will we let others (I Corinthians 2:11).
• If you join our newsletter, we will send (fun, exciting!) regular church email updates but will never spam, or exploit nor try to sell anything to you. Your soul matters to us, not your wallet (Matthew 6:24).

The main website address is https://www.terraceshores.com, also reachable as https://www.terraceshores.org. Both lead to the same place, and our contact address is admin@terraceshores.org.

Two places, not one

It helps to know that the church keeps information in two separate places, and that they are not the same thing.

• This website holds our pages, sermons, bulletins and news, and whatever you type into a contact form here.
• Church Center, which is the congregation-facing side of Planning Center, holds our calendar, our giving, our event sign-ups and our member directory. It is a separate service with its own account, its own security and its own privacy policy.

Where this website shows you something from Church Center: the calendar of events, the giving form, or a sign-up for an event; that information is coming from Planning Center and anything you enter there goes to Planning Center. It does not pass through this website and is not stored here. Where a page here simply links out to Church Center, you are leaving this site altogether.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Contact forms

When you send us something through a form on this site we keep what you typed, so that we can read it and reply, along with the time it was sent and your IP address and browser, which help us tell a real message from an automated one. Those messages are stored in this website’s database and are also emailed to the church office.

Comments

If you leave a comment we keep the comment and the details you gave with it, plus your IP address and browser, for spam detection.

Giving

Giving is handled by Planning Center Giving, through Church Center. On our giving page the Church Center form is shown inside our page; everything you enter in it: your name, your email, the amount, and your card or bank details, goes directly to Planning Center and its payment processor.

Card and bank details never reach this website and are never stored on it. We could not see them if we wanted to. What the church can see, in Planning Center, is the record of a gift: who gave, when, how much, and to which fund, which is what allows us to thank you and to send year-end giving statements.

Our website also still carries the GiveWP plugin from the years when giving was handled here, and it may hold records of gifts made before we moved to Planning Center. Those older records contain names, email addresses and amounts. They have never contained card numbers, which were handled then, as now, by a payment processor and not by us.

Church directory

Our directory is on Church Center. It is not part of this website: the link in our menu takes you there, and your account, your password and everything in your profile belong to Planning Center. The directory is visible only to people the church has admitted to it, and what you share in it is yours to change or remove at any time from within Church Center.

Events and sign-ups

Our calendar is drawn from Planning Center and from the church’s own listings. Where an event asks you to sign up, that sign-up is a Church Center form and what you enter goes to Planning Center.

Newsletter

If you join our email list, your name and email address are sent to Mailchimp, which sends our letters for us and keeps a record of who is subscribed. Every letter carries a link to unsubscribe, which takes effect immediately and needs nothing from us.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment you may opt in to saving your name and email address in cookies, so that you need not type them again.

If you log in to the website (which, in practice, means those of us who edit it) we set cookies to remember your session and your screen preferences. Login cookies last two days, or two weeks if you choose “Remember Me”, and screen preferences last a year. Logging out removes them.

The services we embed set cookies of their own; those are described below and are governed by their own policies rather than by ours.

Embedded content from other websites

Pages on this site include content from elsewhere and embedded content behaves exactly as if you had visited that other website, which may set cookies, collect data about you and follow what you do with it. On this site that means:

• YouTube, for the Sunday livestream and for sermon video (Google privacy policy)
• Church Center, for the giving form (Planning Center privacy policy)
• Facebook, for the feed of church posts (Meta privacy policy)
• Google Fonts, for some of the type this site is set in

Analytics

We use Google Analytics (GA4) to see roughly how many people visit and which pages they read, so that we know whether the site is healthy and what is worth improving. We do nothing else with it. We do not build profiles of individuals, we do not advertise, and none of it is shared with anyone.

Your data

How long we retain your data

Comments and their metadata are kept indefinitely, so that follow-up comments from the same person can be recognised and approved automatically. Messages sent through our contact forms are kept in the website’s database until we clear them out. For anyone with an account on this website, we keep the information in their profile until the account is removed.

Information held in Planning Center, such as giving records, directory profiles, and event sign-ups, is kept there under the church’s Planning Center account, and giving records are kept as long as we are required to keep them for tax and accounting purposes.

What rights you have over your data

You may ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and you may ask us to erase it. This does not extend to anything we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security reasons. A record of a charitable gift being the usual example.

For anything held in Church Center you can see and change most of it yourself by signing in, and we can help with the rest.

Where we send your data

Comments may be checked by an automated spam detection service. Beyond that, information reaches only the services named here, each for the one purpose it is named for:

• Planning Center / Church Center: giving, directory, calendar, event sign-ups (privacy policy)
• Mailchimp: the email newsletter (privacy policy)
• Google: analytics, embedded video, fonts (privacy policy)
• BlogVault: encrypted backups of this website (privacy policy)
• Our web host (Dreamhost): where this website and its database live (we are grateful they provide free hosting for non-profits such as TS), see their privacy policy

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

How we protect your data

The site is served over an encrypted connection, its software is kept up to date, and administrative access is limited to the few people who maintain it. Backups are taken regularly and stored encrypted with BlogVault.

The most sensitive information a church handles—card details and directory passwords—is deliberately not held here at all. It sits with Planning Center, whose business is to look after it. So if this website were ever compromised, that information would not be.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If we discover a breach we will contain it, work out what was affected, tell the people affected and any authority we are required to tell, and change whatever allowed it to happen. Where a breach concerns information held by Planning Center or another service, we will pass on what they tell us as soon as we know it.

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

None. Nothing here decides anything about you automatically, and we do not profile visitors.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

We aim to comply with applicable data protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Your rights of access, correction and deletion can be exercised by contacting us at the address below.

Contact information

For any privacy-related question, please contact us:

Terrace Shores Evangelical Free Church
Email: admin@terraceshores.org
Phone: (920) 398-2734
Address: W3278 County Road K, Markesan, WI 53946

We will update this policy as our practices change. It was last reviewed in September 2026.