Thrive Church App: Terms of Service

Version 版本：1.3 Effective 生效日：2026-09-13

Applies to: the Thrive Church mobile app and the staff web admin, operated by 社團法人興世代教會 (Thrive Church). 適用範圍： 由社團法人興世代教會（Thrive Church）營運的 Thrive Church 行動 App 與同工後台網站。

Languages. The English version and the Traditional Chinese version are meant to say the same thing. If they ever differ, the English version governs.

語言。 以下的英文版與繁體中文版，內容應為一致。若兩者有任何歧異，以英文版為準。

1. Welcome#

Thrive Church (社團法人興世代教會, "the church", "we", "us") makes this app for the people of our church family. It is here to help you stay connected to your family group, read the Bible, follow along with Sunday, pray for one another, and reach the staff team when you need to.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are the agreement between you and the church for your use of the app. By creating an account, or by continuing to use the app after these Terms take effect, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not use the app, and talk to us at app@thrivetaipei.com if something here concerns you.

We have tried to write these Terms the way we would say them out loud. They are still real terms, and they matter, so please read them.

Your privacy is covered separately in our Privacy Policy, which you can open any time from Profile in the app and which explains what we collect, who can see it, how long we keep it, and what rights you have. The two documents work together.

2. This app is not for emergencies#

Please read this section even if you read nothing else.

The app is not monitored around the clock. Messages, care requests, and prayer requests are read by people, and people sleep, travel, and take days off. A message sent at 2am may not be read until the morning.

If you or someone else is in danger, do not use this app.

• In Taiwan, call 119 for an ambulance or fire, and 110 for the police.
• For emotional crisis or suicidal thoughts, the Ministry of Health and Welfare counselling line is 1925 (24 hours, free).
• For the protection of children, young people, women, or anyone facing abuse, call 113 (24 hours).

If you are outside Taiwan, please use your local emergency number.

We do not run an emergency line. Thrive has no number that is answered around the clock, so please use the lines above rather than waiting for the church. Once you are safe, tell us at app@thrivetaipei.com, or patrick.ng@thrivetaipei.com if it concerns a child, and a person will follow up.

Nothing in the app, including the care request form and messages with the staff team, is a substitute for emergency services, medical care, counselling, legal advice, or financial advice. Staff and volunteers are not acting as your doctor, counsellor, lawyer, or financial adviser, and no professional relationship of that kind is created by using the app.

3. Who may use the app#

By approval. The app is for people connected to Thrive Church. When you sign up, your account starts in a pending state. A staff member reviews it and either approves it or does not. Until it is approved you will not be able to see member content, and we may decline an account without giving a reason.

Age. The app is intended for people aged 18 and over. If you are under 18, you may only use the app with the knowledge and permission of a parent or legal guardian, and that parent or guardian accepts these Terms with you. Please be aware that the app does not currently ask for or verify anyone's age, so we rely on you telling us the truth. If you believe a child is using the app without their guardian's permission, please tell us at patrick.ng@thrivetaipei.com.

One person, one account. Your account is yours. Please do not create an account for someone else, sign up on behalf of someone else, or share an account with a spouse, friend, or family member. Some content is scoped to individual people, so a shared account will show the wrong things to the wrong person.

Guests. A visitor who has not signed up may still send a connection card through the app. Doing so does not create an account and does not give access to member content.

Leaving well. If you move away or stop attending, please tell us. We can mark your account as departed, which closes off member content while preserving the records we are required to keep. You can also delete your account entirely; see section 15.

4. Your account and keeping it secure#

You sign in with your email address and a password. You are responsible for:

• Choosing a real password. Use something long and unique to this app, and please do not reuse a password you use elsewhere.
• Keeping it to yourself. Do not share your password, and do not let someone else use your signed-in device to read your conversations.
• Locking your phone. The app shows message previews on your lock screen unless you turn that off in your phone's settings. Anyone who can unlock your phone can read your conversations.
• Telling us quickly. If you think someone has got into your account, email app@thrivetaipei.com straight away and change your password.

We cannot see your password, and we will never ask you for it. No one from Thrive will ever ask for your password by message, email, or phone. If someone does, it is not us; please report it to app@thrivetaipei.com.

Please also keep your profile accurate, especially your name and how you can be contacted, so that your family group leader can actually reach you. Some fields, including your email address, your family group, and your membership status, are managed by staff rather than by you. Ask us if one of them needs correcting.

5. How we talk to each other in the app#

The app carries several kinds of conversation, and they work differently. It is worth knowing which is which before you type.

Church-wide channels and family group rooms. Seen by everyone in that channel or group. Treat them as you would treat speaking up in a room full of church family.

Direct messages and member-created group chats. Private between the people in them. Staff cannot read them. The exceptions are described in section 9 and in the Privacy Policy.

Messages with the staff team. When you write to the staff team through the app, you are writing to the whole staff team, not to one individual. This is deliberate, so that care is shared and accountable rather than resting on one person's memory, and so nothing is lost if someone is away. If you need to tell one specific person something in confidence, please speak to them directly.

Prayer requests. The church-wide prayer wall and your family group's prayer wall are seen by the members of that group or of the church. Posting anonymously hides your name from other members and from staff, but it is not the same as being unknown to us: the record still identifies you internally, and the Safeguarding Officer can see who posted if there is a safety concern. Please do not post anonymously in the belief that no one at all can tell it is you.

Care requests. The care request form goes to the staff team. If you tick the box to share it with your family group leader, your leader will also see it. If you do not tick it, they will not.

Things worth knowing. Poll votes in a chat are visible to everyone in that channel, so a poll is not a secret ballot. Event RSVPs work differently: other members only see the totals, but every staff account can see exactly who answered what. Unsending a message hides it from the conversation but does not erase it, and a notification that has already reached someone's phone cannot be recalled. Reporting a message sends it to the Safeguarding Officer, and after you send it you cannot read it back, not even the reason you typed.

Some messaging features have been built but are not switched on. Do not rely on them or assume the app is recording them, because it is not. We will say so before any of them goes live.

6. Community standards#

This app is part of the life of a church. The standard we ask for is simple: speak to and about one another the way you would want to be spoken to and about.

In chat, please:

• Be kind, especially when you disagree.
• Assume the best of what someone meant before you react to the worst reading of it.
• Keep conversations roughly on topic for the channel you are in.
• Remember that some people here read in English and some read in Chinese, and that jokes, sarcasm, and very short replies are the easiest things to misread in a second language.
• Remember that what you write can be screenshotted, reported, and read later by people you did not have in mind.

With prayer requests, please:

• Share your own story freely, and other people's stories carefully. If a request is really about someone else's illness, marriage, family, or failure, ask yourself whether they would want it posted, and ask them if you can.
• Do not use a prayer request to pass on gossip, to make a point about someone, or to raise a concern that should go to a leader directly.
• Understand that people pray for what they read. A request posted to the church-wide wall is genuinely public to the members of this church.

With photos, please:

• Only upload photos you took or have the right to share.
• Get permission before posting a recognizable photo of another adult, and get a parent or guardian's permission before posting a recognizable photo of a child.
• Do not post a photo of someone who has asked not to be photographed, and take a photo down promptly if someone asks you to.
• Remember that family group photos can be seen by everyone in that group and by church staff.

Everywhere, please remember that some people here are new, some are not Christians, some are far from home, and some are carrying things you cannot see. The app should be a safe place to be any of those.

7. What is not allowed#

You may not use the app to:

• Harass, bully, threaten, stalk, intimidate, or humiliate anyone.
• Post or send sexual content, sexually suggestive messages, or nudity, whether of yourself or of anyone else.
• Groom, sexualise, solicit, or make sexual contact with a child or young person, or attempt any of this. There is no tolerance for this, ever, and we will report it to the authorities.
• Post content that is hateful or degrading toward a person or group, including on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, sex, or background.
• Share someone else's private information, including their phone number, LINE ID, address, immigration status, health information, or giving history, without their permission.
• Screenshot or forward a private message, a care request, or a prayer request outside the app without the permission of the person who wrote it.
• Advertise, sell, solicit business, run a multi-level marketing scheme, recruit for another organization, or fundraise for anything other than the church, unless staff have agreed in advance.
• Solicit personal loans or money from other members.
• Post spam, chain messages, or repeated unwanted contact after someone has asked you to stop.
• Impersonate another member, a staff member, or the church itself.
• Post anything illegal under the laws of Taiwan, or anything that encourages illegal activity.
• Attempt to break, probe, overload, or work around the security of the app or the staff web admin; attempt to access accounts, conversations, or records that are not yours; or use automated tools to scrape member data.
• Use member contact details you found in the app for anything other than ordinary church community life.

If you are not sure whether something is allowed, ask a leader before you post it.

8. Reporting, blocking, and what happens next#

Reporting. You can report any message in a conversation you are part of, and any prayer wall post you can see. Reports go confidentially to the Safeguarding Officer, not to the general staff team. When you file a report, the message is saved as it was at that moment so it cannot be edited or unsent away, and a preservation hold is placed on the person who wrote it. Once you send a report you cannot open it again, including the reason you typed, because only the Safeguarding Officer can read a report. Keep your own note first if you want a record. You will also not be told exactly what happens next, because the outcome usually involves someone else's private situation, but the report is read and acted on. Please do not file reports that you know to be untrue.

Blocking. You can block another member. Blocking hides their messages from you and yours from them, and stops either of you starting a direct message with the other. A blocked person is not told that you blocked them. Blocking is a personal boundary, not a report; if something needs looking into, please report it as well as blocking.

When we act. Depending on what happened, we may talk with the people involved, ask someone to take content down, remove a post from a prayer wall, restrict an account, remove someone from a family group or channel, suspend an account, or close it. Serious matters, especially anything involving a child or a young person, are handled under the church's Safeguarding and Retention Policy and may be reported to the authorities regardless of what anyone involved would prefer.

Being removed. If we suspend or close your account for a breach of these Terms, we will normally tell you and normally explain why, but we may not do so where telling you would put someone at risk, would identify a person who reported you, or would interfere with an investigation.

If you think we got it wrong. Write to appeal@thrivetaipei.com. A person who was not involved in the original decision will look at it again.

9. Safeguarding and the officer's role#

The church has a named Safeguarding Officer whose job is to protect people, especially children and young people, and to hold the small number of powers that protecting people requires. This role exists so that those powers sit with one accountable person instead of being spread across the staff team.

The Safeguarding Officer can read reports that members file, place a preservation hold that stops the automatic deletion of anything a person was part of, mark a message as a safeguarding record so that it is preserved permanently, and retrieve a full record of a member's conversations, including direct messages and messages already deleted or unsent, where there is a safeguarding or legal reason to do so.

Every one of these actions is written to an audit log that cannot be edited or deleted. The officer's powers are for safety, not for curiosity, and using them without a reason is itself a breach of the church's policy.

What this means for you, said plainly. Ordinary staff cannot read your private messages. The Safeguarding Officer can, if there is a safeguarding or legal reason. The people who administer the church's database are technically able to reach stored data, as is true of any app. A conversation in this app is private from other members and from the staff team; it is not secret from the church as an institution, and it is not encrypted in a way that would prevent lawful access. Please do not write anything in the app that you would need to be truly unrecoverable.

The full detail is in the church's Safeguarding and Retention Policy and in the Privacy Policy, under Profile in the app.

10. What you post stays yours#

You own what you write and upload. Your messages, prayer requests, reflections, notes, and photos belong to you. The church does not claim ownership of them.

You give us permission to run the app with them. So that the app can work, you give the church a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, copy, display, translate for display, and transmit what you post, to the people you posted it to, for as long as we hold it under our retention policy. This license exists for one purpose, which is operating the app and the ministry of the church. It does not let us publish your prayer request on a poster, put your photo on the church website, or hand your content to anyone outside the church for their own use.

If we want to use something more widely, for example a testimony in a service, a photo on our website, or a story in a newsletter, we will ask you first and you are free to say no.

You are responsible for what you post. By posting, you confirm that it is yours to post, that you have any permission needed from other people who appear in it, and that it does not break these Terms or anyone else's rights.

Deleting is not always erasing. You can unsend a chat message within a short window and delete your own prayer wall post at any time. Both remove it from view. Neither necessarily erases it from our records straight away, because of the retention and safeguarding rules described in the Privacy Policy and the Safeguarding and Retention Policy. Content that has been reported or preserved under a hold is kept regardless.

Feedback. If you send us an idea for improving the app, we may use it without owing you anything for it. We appreciate it all the same.

11. The church's content, and the Bible text#

Our content. Sermons, announcements, event details, service orders, reading plans, study material, images, and the design and code of the app belong to the church or to the people we licensed them from. You are welcome to use them for your own personal and family group use. Please do not republish them, sell them, or present them as your own.

English Bible text (ESV). Scripture quotations in English are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text is provided in the app under license from Crossway and may not be copied out of the app, stored, or redistributed beyond the personal use that license allows. It may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from Crossway, except as that license permits.

Offline Bible text (和合本 and the Berean Standard Bible). When the app cannot reach the internet, it shows Scripture from two translations stored in the app itself: the Chinese Union Version (和合本, 1919) in Chinese and the Berean Standard Bible in English. Both are in the public domain, and the app tells you which one you are reading whenever it uses them instead of the ESV or 新譯本.

Chinese Bible text (新譯本). Scripture quotations in Chinese are from the Chinese New Version (《聖經新譯本》), copyright © 1976, 1992, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2010 The Worldwide Bible Society Limited (環球聖經公會有限公司). Used by written permission. The Chinese text is served to signed-in members one passage at a time and is not stored on your device; it may not be downloaded, exported, copied out of the app in bulk, or redistributed. Where you quote it, please keep the line 「經文引自《聖經新譯本》，版權屬環球聖經公會。」 with the quotation, which is a condition of the permission the church was given.

Other material. Reading plans, devotional notes, and study material written by our staff are the church's. Third-party material, where any is included, remains its owner's and is used with permission or under the license its owner grants.

GIFs, stickers, and links. Content you bring in from outside the app, including GIFs, belongs to whoever made it, and its own provider's terms apply to it. Links shared in chat lead to places we do not control and are not responsible for.

12. Giving#

The app does not take your money. There is no payment processing in this app. When you give, you make the transfer yourself through your own bank or through whatever method the church has published. The app is a place to tell us that you gave, and to see the record afterwards.

Donations are non-refundable. A gift to the church is a donation, not a purchase. Once it is given it is not refundable, and it is not exchangeable for goods, services, membership, standing, or influence. We may make an exception at our discretion where there has been a genuine mistake, for example a duplicated transfer or an amount typed with an extra zero. If that happens, contact finance@thrivetaipei.com as soon as you notice, and please expect us to ask for details.

Our accounting records are the source of truth. The giving figures shown in the app come from the church's accounting system, imported by our finance team. Where the app and the church's accounting records disagree, the accounting records govern. What you enter in the app is your report of a gift, not proof of one; a gift is recorded when it is matched against the church's bank records.

Please check your records. Look at your giving records in the app from time to time, and tell finance@thrivetaipei.com within 90 days if something looks wrong. Matching is done by people, and people occasionally match a transfer to the wrong person or miss one entirely. We will correct genuine errors as soon as we can verify them.

Receipts and tax. Tax receipts are issued after the church publishes them for a given year, and only to the extent the church's records support them. If you want your giving reported to the tax authority, you may give us your ID number for that purpose. That is optional, it is stored encrypted, you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it deletes it. See the Privacy Policy for the detail.

Designated gifts. Where you give toward a specific purpose we will do our reasonable best to honor it. If that purpose is fully funded, is discontinued, or turns out not to be legally or practically possible, the church may direct the gift to a related purpose or to general funds.

Fraud. Please be alert. If you get a message asking you to send money to a different account "for the church", or asking for gift cards, treat it as a scam, do not send anything, and tell us at finance@thrivetaipei.com. Our bank details are published in the app and on https://www.thrivetaipei.com/, and they do not change by direct message.

13. Privacy#

What we collect, who can see it, where it is stored, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it are all set out in our Privacy Policy, which you can open from Profile in the app. Please read it; it is the more important of the two documents for most people. By using the app you also agree to that policy.

Two things from it are worth repeating here, because they surprise people:

• Notifications carry content. If you have notifications on, a push notification may show the sender's name and part of a message on your lock screen, and it passes through other companies' notification services to get to your phone.
• Your data is not stored in Taiwan. The app runs on infrastructure located in Singapore, and notifications pass through the United States. That is an international transfer of your personal data out of Taiwan. The Privacy Policy explains it properly.

14. Suspension, removal, and changes to the app#

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these Terms, that puts someone at risk, that is being used to harm or harass, that appears to be compromised or fraudulent, or where we are required to by law. Where the risk is serious we may act immediately and talk afterwards. Where it is not, we will normally talk first.

We may change the app. Features may be added, changed, or removed, and the app may be unavailable at times for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. We may also stop offering the app entirely. If we do, we will give reasonable notice where we can, and we will handle your data according to the Privacy Policy.

You can stop any time. You are free to stop using the app, sign out, or delete your account. Nothing in the app is a condition of belonging to this church.

What survives. Sections about content ownership, giving, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and governing law continue to apply after your account ends, along with any part of these Terms that by its nature ought to.

15. Deleting your account#

You can delete your account from Settings in the app.

What happens. When you tap delete, your account is switched off straight away. You lose access to member content, you disappear from the member directory, and notifications stop. Nothing is erased at that moment. Your name, email address, phone number, and LINE ID are left exactly as they were.

Thirty days to change your mind. For thirty days the deletion is pending and you can cancel it, either by signing back in and cancelling it yourself or by asking staff to cancel it for you. Cancelling restores your account exactly as it was, because nothing was destroyed.

After thirty days. Your profile details are scrubbed and the account is permanently deleted.

Two things that will not simply disappear. First, if you are under a preservation hold, for example because a safeguarding matter or a legal matter involving you is open, the deletion is refused for as long as that lasts. Second, deletion scrubs your profile and only your profile. Records elsewhere stop being linked to your account, but any text in them stays as it was typed. In practice that means your name, and the contact details you entered at the time, stay on any form you submitted, on any sermon response you wrote, and on donation records imported from the church's accounts, along with giving and tax records, care records, safeguarding records, and the audit log. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what survives and why, and how to ask a staff member to remove your name from the records that are not held for safety or tax reasons.

One more thing. If you are the last staff account, the app will not let you delete yourself, because doing so would leave the church with no way to administer it.

16. The app is provided as it is#

We build and run this app as a ministry, without charge, mostly with limited hands. We work hard on it and we care that it is right, but we cannot promise perfection.

The app and everything in it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, to the fullest extent Taiwan law allows. In particular, we do not promise:

• that the app will always be available, or will work on every device or every version of iOS or Android;
• that it will be free of bugs, errors, or interruptions;
• that messages, notifications, or reminders will always be delivered, delivered on time, or delivered only to the people you intended;
• that data will never be lost, and you should not treat the app as the only copy of anything important to you;
• that content posted by other members is accurate, wise, or appropriate;
• that any spiritual, personal, financial, or practical outcome will follow from using it.

Content posted by members is theirs, not ours, and does not represent the views of the church. We do not review it before it is posted.

Advice, opinions, prayers, and encouragement shared by members, volunteers, or staff through the app are offered in the ordinary life of a church community. They are not professional medical, mental health, legal, immigration, or financial advice, and you should get professional help for anything that needs it.

17. Limitation of liability#

To the fullest extent Taiwan law allows:

• The church, its staff, its volunteers, and its leaders are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive loss, or for lost data, lost opportunity, or emotional distress, arising out of your use of the app.
• We are not liable for what other members do, say, post, or share, or for what happens between members outside the app.
• We are not liable for failures of the services the app depends on, including app stores, notification services, hosting providers, and internet or mobile networks.
• Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total liability to you for everything arising out of the app is limited to NT$1,000, reflecting that the app is provided free of charge.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that Taiwan law does not permit to be limited.

18. Third-party services and app stores#

The app depends on services provided by other companies, including our hosting and database provider, the notification services that deliver push messages, the ESV Bible service, and the GIF search service. Those companies have their own terms and their own privacy practices, and your use of the app involves them. We choose them carefully but we do not control them.

If you installed the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, that store's terms also apply. This agreement is between you and the church, not between you and Apple or Google. Apple and Google are not responsible for the app, for supporting it, or for any claim about it, although Apple and its subsidiaries may enforce the parts of these Terms that concern them as third-party beneficiaries.

19. Governing law and disputes#

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

If something goes wrong between us, please come and talk to us first. Write to app@thrivetaipei.com and we will try to sort it out person to person, because that is how a church family should handle a disagreement, and because it is almost always faster.

If a dispute cannot be resolved that way, you and the church agree that the Taiwan Taipei District Court shall be the court of first instance with jurisdiction, unless the law requires otherwise. Nothing here stops you from making a complaint to a regulator, or from exercising any right you have under the Personal Data Protection Act.

20. How these Terms change#

We may update these Terms, for example when the app changes, when we add a feature, or when the law changes.

• For small changes, such as corrections, clarifications, or new contact details, we will update this document and change the date at the top.
• For significant changes, such as new obligations on you or a real change to how the app works, we will give you notice in the app or by email at least 30 days before they take effect.

Continuing to use the app after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, you can delete your account under section 15.

The current version is always in the app, under Profile, and when we can we will keep previous versions available so you can see what changed.

21. Other things#

The whole agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between you and the church about the app.

If part of it fails. If a court finds any part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

No transfer. You cannot transfer your account or your rights under these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours if the church reorganises, merges, or changes legal form.

Language. These Terms are published in English and Traditional Chinese. The two versions are meant to say the same thing. If they ever differ, the English version governs.

22. Contact us#

• General questions about the app: app@thrivetaipei.com
• Privacy questions and requests about your data: app@thrivetaipei.com
• Safeguarding concerns: patrick.ng@thrivetaipei.com
• Giving and receipts: finance@thrivetaipei.com
• Appeals against a suspension or removal: appeal@thrivetaipei.com
• By post: 社團法人興世代教會 (Thrive Church), 4th Floor, No. 98, Section 3, Xinsheng South Road, Da'an District, Taipei City

In an emergency, do not email us. Call 119, 110, 1925, or 113, as set out in section 2.