AskMyChurch is built to be anonymous by default. You can ask your hardest questions without an account, and we never require an email to get an answer.
When you ask the assistant a question, we do not store your name, account, IP address, browser/user-agent, or referrer with it — your questions are anonymous. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. (Basic page-view counts, like any website's traffic stats, do record a browser/user-agent; that is separate from your questions, which stay anonymous.)
We store the questions and answers — without identity — to improve the assistant, along with a random, anonymous session identifier that keeps a single conversation coherent. Messages that appear sensitive or pastoral are handled with extra care and are shown to your church only as anonymized themes and counts, never verbatim. Vision Genesis administrators may access message content to operate, secure, and improve the service. No human at Vision Genesis routinely reads your visitors' questions; access requires our admin credentials and is used only to operate and secure the service.
For ordinary questions the assistant couldn't answer, your church sees the wording of the question — so staff can spot what's missing from the website and fix it — but never who asked: no name, no email, no IP, no device. Sensitive or pastoral messages are different: your church sees those only as anonymous themes and counts (for example, "a few people asked about grief this week"), never word-for-word.
Your questions are answered by Anthropic's Claude and, where a church has it enabled, OpenAI's GPT — both of which process the text of a question to produce and check an answer. Everything runs on Cloudflare's global edge network; there is no separate data center. Notification emails to your church go through Resend; our own internal service alerts go through Pushover. Nothing is sent to advertisers.
Neither Ask My Church nor our AI providers (Anthropic and OpenAI) use your church's content for training.
Messages the assistant detects as sensitive or pastoral are never kept word-for-word — only an anonymous category and count. It reads them only long enough to answer, then the words are gone. One dated exception, in the interest of honesty: conversations from before August 17, 2026 — when this protection shipped — were stored under our previous retention rules and finish aging out of storage automatically no later than September 16, 2026, under the 30-day deletion schedule now in force. Your church sees only an anonymous count that someone reached out about a hard topic.
Questions and answers are kept no more than 30 days, then permanently deleted. After that we keep only anonymous theme counts — no wording, no identity.
You are only identified when you choose to share your contact information — for example, to request prayer, to serve, to plan a visit, or to request a demo. That information goes to your church (or, for a demo request, to us) so a real person can follow up. The assistant always answers first and never holds an answer hostage for an email.
Messages that signal acute distress are routed to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, the Crisis Text Line, and your church's own care contacts before any AI responds. This runs first, in code.
The assistant is a general-information tool answering from a church's public content. It is not directed at collecting personal information from children.