How Threshold uses your church's data

Threshold helps a church see where it is, what to build next, and who should own it. Everything it knows about your church exists to serve your church. This page is the plain walkthrough; the Privacy page is the formal version.

The short version

  • Threshold works fully by hand. Connecting Planning Center or Church Metrics is optional, and no feature is ever gated behind a connection.
  • Threshold only reads from your providers. It never writes anything back to them.
  • You choose what comes in. Nothing imports from Planning Center until a leader picks which membership classes to include, and nothing counts from Church Metrics until a leader maps its categories.
  • Synced numbers always say where they came from, and your own manual entry stays available.
  • Your church's data is never sold, and never visible to another church.

What Threshold reads from Planning Center

When a leader connects Planning Center, Threshold asks for read access to specific areas, each serving one purpose:

  • People— names, contact details, and membership status, so your directory doesn't have to be retyped. Only the membership classes you choose are imported.
  • Check-ins — attendance counts and participation patterns, so trends reflect reality.
  • Groups and Giving — summary rollups (how many groups, aggregate giving trend). Individual gift amounts are never shown on any church surface.
  • Services — serving schedules and team rosters, so ministry coverage is visible.
  • Calendar — event and room usage, so facility planning starts from real utilization.
  • Registrations — class and event signups, so equipping participation is visible.

Never read: background checks. Threshold deliberately does not request them.

What Threshold reads from Church Metrics

Attendance records only: service counts by the categories you map (adults, kids, and so on). Categories you leave unmapped are skipped, never guessed at. Contribution and salvation categories are never treated as attendance.

How your credentials are held

Planning Center access uses OAuth, so Threshold never sees your Planning Center password. Church Metrics uses an API key you enter once. Both are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before storage with a key that lives only on the server, are never shown to anyone through the app, and are deleted the moment you disconnect.

Who sees what inside your church

Access follows tiers your church controls. Leaders see the planning machinery; members see a deliberately limited view with no leader notes and no internal planning detail, enforced in the data layer rather than merely hidden on screen. Member contact details appear in the member directory only if your church turns that directory on (it starts off). Sensitive records, like mapped home locations, are restricted further to a per person access list managed by senior leaders.

AI features

A few features send specific content to Anthropic's Claude API, and only when you explicitly invoke them: reading an uploaded building plan, summarizing contractor quotes, drafting a season synthesis. Nothing is sent to any AI service in the background, and Anthropic does not train on API submissions.

Research

A church can opt in to research use (off by default). With consent, Threshold captures church level aggregates only, with the church's identity pseudonymized, to tune its readiness models. Individual member records never enter the research corpus, and consent can be withdrawn at any time.

How we rate our data

Threshold shows church-health context with a small evidence chip beside every claim. The chip describes the evidence, never your church — there is no grade, score, or traffic light on a congregation. Stronger dots mean stronger research behind the number, and tapping a chip shows the source, the year, and the honest limits.

  • Researched — nationally representative, peer-reviewed, or credible longitudinal studies (for example the National Congregations Study and Faith Communities Today). Used as context on where you stand.
  • Your tradition's data — a denomination's own reported figures, shown only to churches in or near that family, with the reporting caveats attached.
  • Proprietary estimate— research from firms whose methods aren't independently verifiable (for example Barna). Kept, labeled, and treated as directional — never a headline cutoff.
  • Practitioner standard— craft wisdom from experienced pastors and consultants (the “200 barrier,” the “80% rule”). Offered as questions and targets your church sets for itself, never as laws.
  • In testing — widely circulated rules that no representative study has confirmed. Shown rarely, and only as hypotheses.

The guiding rule throughout: your own trend and your own community come first; national numbers are context, never verdict. Vendor statistics that only measure a vendor's own customers are not used at all.

Leaving

Disconnect a provider any time; its credentials are deleted immediately, and the data already in your church's records stays yours to keep or remove. A church can be deleted entirely from its settings, and an account from Settings. Deletion cascades through everything the church entered or synced.

Questions

Anything unclear, or a scenario this page doesn't cover: send us a request. How the recommendations themselves are made: how Threshold works. See also Privacy and Terms.