The privacy policy of The Danish Lutheran Church of Vancouver, B.C., is to follow the law. To help us do that, we have here tried to think about all the ways your private information may come our way and how we deal with that.
Our web site does not use cookies or any other form of hidden data collection. Therefore we only know that about you which you explicitly have told us. Occasionally your relatives or friends may list you as a witness for a wedding or baptism. In that case, we allow ourselves to assume that they have your permission.
A few features of our web site are provided by third party:
When we began using these providers, they had reasonable privacy policies, but they are clearly beyond our control. Likewise, we cannot be responsible for the third party web sites that we link to.
If you get baptised, confirmed, or married in our church, we record your name, your parents' names, the names of the witnesses/godparents, and your place of birth and/or current address. We use this information to issue a Baptismal or Marriage Certificate for you, we usually publish your name and the happy occasion in our newsletter, Kirkebladet, we put up the confirmation group picture in the Church Hall, and then we keep the information in perpetuity.
If we celebrate a funeral or memorial service for you, we likewise record your name, publish your passing in our newsletter, and then keep the information in perpetuity.
If you should ever need a replacement for your certificate, we shall happily produce one for you or your immediate family. Note that your Baptismal Certificate or Marriage Certificate is not a legal document in Canada.
We do not release this information to third party until the persons concerned have been dead for 20 years. In case of doubt, we will adapt the rules used by the B.C. Vital Statistics Agency.
If our church should ever disband, we will likely send our Church Registry to DSUK in Denmark for safekeeping. In that case, access to our records would be governed by Danish privacy rules.
In Denmark pastoral confidentiality is absolute (except if revealing the information can prevent a serious crime): the courts cannot compel a pastor to testify about information he or she learned in confidence as a pastor. Indeed, revealing such information to anyone would be illegal.
Our pastor therefore treats confidentiality as if it were absolute. We do not know to which extent the law here in British Columbia, Canada, protects pastoral confidentiality, and we hope that we will never have occasion to find out.
If you make a donation to our church, thank you! If we can identify you, for example by the name printed on your cheque or through the envelope system, we will issue a charitable donation receipt to you. We keep a record of your donation for five years as required by the Canadian Revenue Agency.
For those who would like their donation publicly acknowledged we offer the option of donation to our newsletter, Kirkebladet. We keep all other donations confidential and share your donation history only with the Canadian Revenue Agency.
If you donate or purchase items using a credit card, we keep a record of the transaction for 18 months as required by our bank.
We do not share your credit card information with anyone except our bank as needed to complete the transaction.
Note that if you donate through CanadaHelps.org, your information is protected by their privacy policy.
We maintain a membership list, a mailing list for our newsletter, Kirkebladet, a few electronic mailing lists, and several informal lists of volunteers. If you have a correction to any of our lists, please contact the office, or 604.298.6112. You can also unsubscribe from our electronic mailing lists by following the link at the bottom of each announcement sent on the lists.