Terms of Service

01Who you are agreeing with

Pastorly is sermon preparation software for pastors and church teams. It is operated from Australia.

The service is operated by its owner, and an operating company is being registered. When that company is registered these terms continue with it in place of the current operator, and this page will name it. In these terms, Pastorly, we and us mean whoever operates the service at the time. You means the person who holds the account.

These terms cover the Pastorly website and the Pastorly application. Our Privacy Policy sits alongside them and forms part of this agreement.

02Who may use Pastorly

You must be at least 18 years old to hold a Pastorly account. By creating one you confirm that you are.

If you are under 18 you must not create an account or use Pastorly. Where an account is opened in breach of this rule, responsibility for that account and for everything done with it rests with the person who opened it and, where that person is a minor, with their parent or guardian. We may close such an account as soon as we become aware of it.

An account belongs to one person. Keep your login to yourself.

If you hold your account for a church, or use Pastorly in its service, you confirm that you are entitled to accept these terms on that church's behalf as well as your own.

03Your account

Give us accurate details when you sign up, and keep them current. Keep your password to yourself and treat it as you would any key to your study.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has reached it, tell us promptly so we can help you shut that down.

04Your work stays yours

You keep ownership of the notes, sermons, lessons and church details you bring to Pastorly. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of your material to us, and nothing here gives us a right to publish it.

So that Pastorly can do the work you ask of it, you give us permission to store your material, to copy and back it up, to process and reformat it, to make new material from it, including the outlines, slides, lessons and studies you ask for, to display it back to you, to build the exports you ask for, to review it as described in our Privacy Policy, which is a choice you control in Settings, and to send what a task needs to the outside services Pastorly runs on, so that what you asked for can be produced and returned to you. Where you share an export, that permission extends to delivering it to the people you send it to.

That permission exists for those purposes and for no other. We do not publish your material, show it to other users, or put it in front of anyone you did not send it to. It ends when you delete the material or close your account, except where a record has to be kept for a reason set out in our Privacy Policy.

As between you and us, what Pastorly produces from your material is yours to use, to adapt, and to teach from. We claim no ownership of it.

We do not sell your sermons or your church information.

05What stays ours

Pastorly itself stays ours. That covers the software, the interface and its design, the way Pastorly is put together, the instructions that drive it, the brand, and everything else that makes Pastorly what it is.

Your account gives you the right to use the service as it is offered, and nothing more. No other right in any of it is granted, and none is granted by implication.

06What Pastorly is not built to hold

Pastorly is built to prepare teaching material. It has no features for managing records about the people in your church, and it is not designed for that work.

Your Notepad is your workspace and we do not police what you write in it. If you choose to keep information about other people in your account, that information is yours to be responsible for. That includes:

• personal details about members of your congregation
• counselling notes, pastoral care records, or prayer requests that identify a person
• giving records or any financial information about a person
• health information about anyone
• safeguarding concerns, allegations, or disciplinary matters
• personal information about a child or a young person, including a name, contact details, family circumstances, or an access or support need

For anything of that kind you confirm that you have the right to hold it, and that holding it in Pastorly does not breach a law, a church policy, or a duty you owe to the person it concerns.

Be aware of where it travels. Pastorly does its work by sending what a task needs to the outside services described in our Privacy Policy. That includes anything you ask Aide about and anything Pastorly prepares for you, and while automatic help is switched on it includes notes Aide is watching for suggestions. You control automatic help in your settings.

A class or group only has to be described to Pastorly by its shape and its needs. That is all Pastorly needs in order to prepare a lesson that fits, and it is the simplest way to keep a name out of a lesson you are going to export and hand to a volunteer.

You are responsible for everything entered into your account, whoever typed it, and you confirm that you have the right to use what you put in.

Pastorly's guidance for youth and children's ministry is help with running a lesson. It is not your church's safeguarding policy and it is not legal advice. Your church's own policy, its designated safeguarding or child safety contact, and your local reporting requirements come first in every case.

07AI-assisted material

Pastorly helps you prepare. It does not preach for you.

What Pastorly produces is a draft drawn from your own material. It is generated by AI models that predict likely text rather than look up settled facts, so a sentence that reads with confidence is not evidence that it is true. That applies to a date, a quotation and an attribution as much as to anything else.

Reviewing that draft before you use it is your responsibility rather than an optional precaution. Check Scripture references, quotations, historical claims and anything attributed to a person against the source before you preach it, publish it, or hand it to a volunteer.

Pastorly checks some of its own work, and those checks do catch mistakes. They reduce error rather than remove it, and not one of them is a warranty. A claim that passed a check has not been confirmed true, a source shown beside an answer has not been endorsed, and anything Pastorly did not flag has not been cleared. All of it is help with your review and none of it is a substitute for it.

We do not promise that generated material is accurate, complete, original, or theologically correct, and we do not promise that it is free of error. An AI system can be confidently wrong, and this one is no exception.

Generated material comes from models we do not own. Similar material may be produced for other people, and we make no claim that any particular output is unique to you or that it can be protected as though it were.

Pastorly is built to a stated doctrinal standard and holds to it deliberately. That is a statement about how Pastorly is built. It is not a warranty about any particular draft.

We do not read generated material before it reaches you. No individual piece of it is a statement of our position, and one that falls short of the standard Pastorly is built to is a draft for you to correct rather than a view we hold.

The discernment stays with you and with your church. You are responsible for what you teach, and nothing Pastorly produces is pastoral, theological, legal, financial, medical or safeguarding advice.

08Scripture and other people's material

Bible text shown in Pastorly is supplied under the terms of the publishers who license it, and the translation is identified where it appears. Keep those identifications in place when you export, print or reproduce a page.

These terms give you no rights in material owned by someone else. If you bring third-party material into your account, the right to use it has to be yours.

09Acceptable use

Use Pastorly lawfully, and for genuine ministry preparation. Beyond that, please do not:

• attempt to break, overload, probe or scrape the service
• work around a limit, an access control or a security measure
• reverse engineer any part of the service, or try to reach its source code
• try to extract or reconstruct the instructions behind Aide's answers or anything else Pastorly produces
• resell, sublicense or redistribute the service
• use Pastorly or anything it produces to build or train a competing product or model
• upload anything malicious, or anything unlawful, infringing or abusive
• impersonate another person, or misrepresent your connection to a church
• use anything Pastorly produces about a particular person to make or support a decision that affects that person legally or materially
• use Pastorly, or give someone access to it, where a sanctions, export or trade law forbids it

We may limit, suspend or end use that threatens the service, its other users, or us, and where the risk calls for it we may act without notice.

Some breaches of this section cause harm that money cannot put right, and in those cases a court order to stop it is a remedy open to us alongside the others.

10Availability, and work in progress

Pastorly is being built, it will keep changing, and parts of it are offered so they can be tried rather than because they are finished.

Anything described as preview, beta or early is provided for evaluation. It may be incomplete, may behave unexpectedly, and may be withdrawn. Do not rely on it for something that matters without keeping your own copy.

We work to keep Pastorly available and improving, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or that any particular feature will remain. We may add, change, pause or retire features, and we will give reasonable notice of a material change where we can.

Where something outside our reasonable control prevents or delays us, such as an outage at a service Pastorly depends on, a network or power failure, a natural event, or an act of government, we are not in breach of these terms for as long as that lasts.

11Plans and payment

We will tell you before a price you are on changes.

Where payment applies it is handled by an outside payment provider. Pastorly does not receive or store your card details.

Payments are not refundable, except where the Australian Consumer Law, or another law that applies to you, requires a refund.

Where a trial is offered, its length is stated when you start it. A trial ends on its own. If you have given us a payment method, the account moves to a paid plan at that point unless you cancelled first, and we will tell you before the first payment is taken. If you have not, access to the paid features stops until you choose a plan. Cancelling during a trial costs nothing.

If something has gone wrong with a payment, write to us and we will look at it. If you ask your bank or card provider to reverse a charge without doing that first, we may suspend or close your account, and we may recover the amount reversed together with any fee charged to us for the reversal.

12Ending your account

You may close your account at any time from your settings. Closing it starts a 30 day grace period, so an accidental request can be undone. After that the account and its content are permanently removed, as described in our Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or end an account that breaches these terms, that puts the service or other people at risk, or where the law requires it. We may also stop offering Pastorly, or end an account, at our discretion, and we will give you reasonable notice and a chance to take your work with you unless the reason makes that impossible.

If we end your account for a reason other than your breach of these terms, and you have paid in advance for a period that has not finished, we will refund the part of it you have not used.

Exports are a way of taking your work with you and they are short-lived by design. Keep your own copies of anything you want to keep.

13Feedback

If you send us a suggestion, a bug report, or an answer you have chosen to share with us, we may use it to improve Pastorly without owing you anything for it and without keeping it confidential. You are not obliged to send us anything, and what you do send stays yours to use as well.

14If something here is yours and should not be

If you believe material in Pastorly infringes your copyright or another right you hold, write to privacy@pastorly.ai with enough detail to identify the material and your claim. We will look into it, and we may remove material or suspend an account while we do.

15Your rights under consumer law

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies a right or guarantee you have under the Australian Consumer Law, or under a similar law where you live, that cannot be excluded.

Where such a guarantee applies and the law permits us to limit our liability for failing to meet it, our liability is limited, at our option, to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.

The two sections that follow are read subject to this one.

16Disclaimers

Subject to the section above, Pastorly is provided as it is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or free of error, that any defect will be corrected, or that it will meet your requirements.

17The limit of our liability

Subject to your rights under consumer law, and to the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, data or opportunity, however it arises
• we are not liable for any loss arising from your reliance on generated material that you did not check
• and our total liability for all claims connected with Pastorly, taken together, is limited to the amount you paid us in the six months before the claim arose

These limits apply however a claim is framed, whether in contract, in negligence, under statute or otherwise.

The outside services Pastorly runs on have the benefit of this section and the one before it, as though those sections named them.

18Your responsibility to us

You agree to cover us against a claim brought against us by someone else, and the reasonable legal costs of defending it, where it arises from the material you put into Pastorly, from your use of what Pastorly produces, or from your breach of these terms or of a law.

This does not apply to the extent the claim is caused by our own breach of these terms or our own negligence. We will tell you promptly if such a claim is made, and we will not settle it without asking you first.

19Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Pastorly changes. If we make a material change we will let you know and update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Pastorly after that means you accept the updated terms.

If you do not accept a change, you may close your account before it takes effect. If you have paid in advance for a period that has not finished, we will refund the part of it you have not used.

20Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of Queensland, Australia. A claim connected with Pastorly has to be brought in the courts of Queensland, and both of us agree not to object to those courts hearing it.

If you live elsewhere you may also have the protection of laws in your own country that cannot be contracted out of. Nothing here takes those away.

21General

If part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

These terms do not make us partners, and neither of us is the other's agent or employee.

We may transfer these terms to another entity, including the operating company described at the top of this page, or as part of a sale of the business. You may not transfer your account to someone else without our agreement.

Closing your account does not end all of this. The sections on your work, on what stays ours, on what Pastorly is not built to hold, on AI-assisted material, on acceptable use, on your rights under consumer law, on disclaimers, on the limit of our liability, on your responsibility to us and on which law applies continue to apply afterwards, for as long as there is a reason for them to.

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about Pastorly.

22Getting in touch

Questions about these terms go to privacy@pastorly.ai. We read everything that arrives there.