Good Post About How Churches Handle Your Info

Bob at the Onward, Forward, Toward… blog, has been presenting a very unusual discussion about church privacy issues. Specifically, your church probably has a lot of information about you including your address, phone number, perhaps email and any other thing you have told them (i.e. occupation, marital status, age, etc.). Bob has brought up the issue of how this information is handled, and who sees it? Specifically, do some churches, in order to raise some money, sell your information to other ministries or even to businesses? Should there be some sort of privacy policy to protect church members from unwanted invasion of their home mail, email, phone, or even people visiting their residences? The residence invasion is my idea in all of this because as a single woman, I want to be careful who knows where I live. There are a few "crazy" Christians out there who want to stalk you because of some fascination they have about you. Here is the last part of the Bob's Part 3 post which I think nicely sums up what he's saying over all. There are also links in this post to the other two parts.


"In summary, the need for privacy policy and information safeguarding in the church is an issue we can no longer deny. It is now needed.

From churches ‘desperate’ for moral change to the outraged Christian mom made hysterical by a ‘family news alert’ on Christian radio, people are using the pragmatic philosophy of “by all means necessary” (with no respect or regard to the rights and feelings of others) to sell/give out personal and private information of their fellow church members “in God’s name” to Christian organizations to “alert” others to the pressing needs of their own agendas. To these people, it seems that a sense of “possessed psychopathy” has taken over their entire being to the point of believing that promoting “the cause’ as they please by any way possible without the feeling of shame, conscience, remorse, or even guilt, supersedes the rights of others who prefer not to be bothered about that person’s personal crusades."

Here then is Part 3 for you to read with links in the post to the other two parts.