Who we are

This website is operated by The Gathering, a Christian community in Santa Cruz, Portugal (“we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal data described here. For any question about your data — or to exercise your rights — email us at info@thegathering.pt.

What we collect

We only collect the information you choose to give us through a form on this site — for example when you contact us, ask to connect with a gathering, or share a testimony. That typically means your name, your email address, your message or testimony, and, if you provide it, your general location. We collect nothing else. This site itself uses no cookies, no analytics, and no third-party tracking. The one exception is giving financially — see "Giving and payments" below, since that takes you to a different site (Stripe's) to complete.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

  • To reply to you and stay in touch — on the basis of your consent, given when you submit a form.
  • To publish a testimony you have explicitly asked us to share (the optional tick box) — on the basis of your explicit consent, which you may withdraw at any time.
  • To process a gift you choose to give — on the basis of fulfilling that transaction and our legal obligation to keep accurate financial records.
  • As a church, we may also process your information as part of our legitimate religious activities, as permitted for religious associations under the GDPR.

Who handles it

Form submissions are processed by Formspree, Inc. (United States), which delivers them to us by email and stores them on our behalf under a data processing agreement, using the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses to protect the EU–US transfer. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone else except as needed to operate these forms.

How long we keep it

We keep your message only as long as we need it to respond and stay in contact, and we delete submissions we no longer need.

The Faith Profile self-assessment

If you use our Faith Profile tool, you provide your name, optionally your email, and your answers to a theological self-assessment — answers that reveal your personal religious beliefs. We only process this on the basis of the explicit consent you give by ticking the box before you begin. Your answers are sent to Anthropic, PBC (United States) to generate your personal report, and the report and answers are then stored under a private, unguessable link that is never published or listed publicly. If you provide an email, we may use it to send you that link via Resend (United States) and, if you ask us to resend it, to look it back up — nothing else. You can ask us to delete your profile at any time.

Giving and payments

If you choose to give financially, the button takes you away from thegathering.pt to Stripe's own secure, hosted checkout page to complete the payment — we never see, receive, or store your card details ourselves. Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, and/or Stripe, Inc.) processes your name, email, and payment details as needed to complete the transaction, prevent fraud, and meet financial and tax record-keeping obligations, under Stripe's own privacy policy — see stripe.com/privacy. Stripe's checkout page may set its own cookies as part of processing your payment securely and safeguards any transfer of your data outside the EEA using the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. We keep a record that a gift was made (for our own accounting and tax obligations), but we do not receive or store your full card number.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to its use, to receive a copy, and to withdraw consent at any time. To exercise any of these, email info@thegathering.pt. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Portuguese data protection authority, the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD)www.cnpd.pt.

Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed.