Privacy
Effective 3 November 2026
parkwestcares.org is where people connected to Park West Church, Knoxville, Tennessee, can share a care need with the church's pastors: a hospital stay, a surgery, a death in the family, a new baby, a hard season, or something to pray for. This page says plainly what happens to what you share.
What we collect
Only what you type into the questions:
- who the need is about and, if it is not you, their name;
- what is going on, and any date or place you give (a hospital, a surgery date, a funeral home);
- anything you write in the free-text box;
- whether you would like a call, a text, or prayer only;
- your name, your phone number, and your email if you give it.
The page sets no cookies and uses no analytics or tracking. The page itself stores nothing in your browser; your browser may offer to remember your name and number as it does on any form. Nothing on the page is loaded from any other company. Like any website, the church's server keeps ordinary technical records of each visit (the connecting address, the browser type and the time) for security and to stop automated abuse. Those records are not linked to what you wrote: your request is stored without your address or browser details. To limit repeated submissions, the server also holds the connecting address, and a scrambled form of the phone number or email you gave, in memory for about an hour and then forgets them.
Who sees it
The pastoral staff of Park West Church, signed in to the church's private care app with their church accounts. Nobody else. When a need arrives, the church's care pastors receive an email saying that one has come in. That email contains only the first name of the person it is about, the category and how urgent it looks. It does not contain what you wrote, your phone number or your email.
No artificial-intelligence service reads, summarizes, sorts, or answers what you share on this page, and none of it is ever used to train one. The only things that read it are the pastors.
What we do with it
A pastor reads it, prays, and, if you asked, calls or texts you. The need is recorded in the church's pastoral care app so the right pastor can follow up and so the team knows who is walking with your household. The name of the person the request is about may be matched against the church's directory (Planning Center) so the right pastor is assigned. The app reads the directory; it does not write to it.
Where it lives
In the church's own Microsoft Azure subscription, in data centers in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest, and visible only to signed-in Park West staff according to their role. Notification emails go through Microsoft's email services and only to church staff addresses.
What we never do
- Sell it, share it with advertisers, or pass it to any other organization.
- Send what you share here to any artificial-intelligence service, or use it to train one.
- Add you to a mailing list.
How long we keep it
Phone number and email are removed from the request 30 days after a pastor has handled it. The care record itself is kept under the church's normal retention (up to two years) and can be deleted on request.
Seeing, correcting, or deleting what you shared
You can ask at any time what the church holds about you from this site, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Email holden@parkwest.org or call the church office at (865) 693-0144. A person will reply.
Signing up to be a Care Leader
The Become a Care Leader page asks for your first and last name, your email, your mobile phone, which campus, and anything you would like us to know. A pastor reads it and reaches out to talk with you personally. The care pastor receives an email saying someone has signed up, with your first name only. No artificial-intelligence service reads what you send, and it is never added to a mailing list.
Whether or not you go on to become a Care Leader, your name, email, phone number and what you wrote are removed from the sign-up 180 days after a pastor has decided about it. For a volunteer a care circle's manager asked, the link to their Planning Center record is cleared at the same time. If you do become a Care Leader, the account the church makes for you uses the email you gave, and your sign-in codes are sent there.
If you are under 18
Please ask a parent or guardian to share the need for you, or ask them to call the church office.
The staff app
The pastors use a separate, sign-in-only app to read and follow up on what you share. It has its own privacy policy, which the church will provide on request.
That app also receives needs the staff raise among themselves, in the church's own staff chat, and those take a different path: the care pastor uses an AI assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic) under his own account to read that chat each morning and pick out which items are still live needs. Those staff messages are sent to Anthropic's service to do that, the same as anything else he asks it to read; he decides what is worth forwarding before anything reaches the app, and he may add a line of his own explaining why. Nothing you share on this page is part of that chat or goes through that assistant.
Contact
Park West Church, Knoxville, Tennessee · church office (865) 693-0144 · holden@parkwest.org