Terms of Service

Stepping Stones International Ministry (also called "SSIM") builds online services for the purpose of furthering the gospel around the world. These Terms of Service govern your use of Stepping Stones and other products, features, apps, services and technologies offered by SSIM herein referenced together as "services", "SSIM services", or "our services". Except where we expressly state that separate terms (and not these) apply. These services are provided to you by Stepping Stones International Ministry. These rules apply to all communications and interactions with SSIM.

We do not charge you to use our services covered by these Terms, unless we state otherwise. At this time we do not generate any ads on our services but we intend in the future to continue our services by serving ads.

Wherever SSIM has provided you with a translation other than the English language version of the Terms of Service, then you agree that the translation is provided for your convenience only, the English language version of the Terms of Service will govern your relationship with SSIM. If there is any contradiction between what the English language version of the Terms of Service says and what a translation says then the English language version shall take precedence.

Changes to Terms

Our services are offered to you by Stepping Stones International Ministry. We may revise and update these Terms from time to time at our sole discretion. Any changes are effective when we post them. Your continued use of any services provided by SSIM following the posting of revised Terms means that you accept and agree to the changes.

Changes to SSIM Services

While we hope to offer our services and all of their features forever, we reserve the right to change or cease offering SSIM or any part, portion or functionality of SSIM services without notice. We will not be liable for any reason if all or any part of our services are unavailable at any time.

Information about You

We will use your personal data, such as but not limited to your IP address, device metadata, user profile, and location data to help determine how to personalize ads relevant to show you.

We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and we don’t share information that directly identifies you (such as your name, email address or other contact information) with advertisers unless you specifically give us permission.

Our Privacy Policy explains more about how we collect and use your personal data on and through our services.

Who can use SSIM services?

You must be 16 years of age or older.
All members are required to adhere to our Community Guidelines.
If you publish articles and blogs on our services, your content must adhere to the SSIM Statement of Faith (which represents a very basic standard of Trinitarian Christian theology, and spans across hundreds of denominations).
Those who do not adhere to the SSIM Statement of Faith are welcome as members however, you may not publish articles or blogs.
- As a user of our services, you are required to respect these beliefs when interacting with our services and SSIM users, even if you do not share them.
Only one account per member is permitted
- no “sock” accounts allowed (additional accounts created by a single person on the same platform, often to manipulate discussions, give the illusion of support or agreement, or to evade bans or other restrictions).
- Our system actively monitors for the creation of multiple accounts. Any attempts to create or use sock accounts will be detected and investigated.
- Violation of this policy will result in severe consequences, including but not limited to: Immediate suspension or permanent banning of all related accounts. Revocation of any privileges or benefits associated with the accounts. Potential legal action if the creation of multiple accounts is used for malicious activities.
- If you believe your account has been wrongly flagged or suspended under this policy, you may appeal by contacting our support team. Provide all relevant information and evidence to support your claim.
You may NOT use SSIM services if:
- You are under 16 years of age
- We’ve previously disabled your SSIM account for violations of our Terms, or Community Standards, or other terms and policies that apply to your use of SSIM. If we disable your account for a violation of our Terms, Community Standards, or other terms and policies, you agree not to create another account without our permission. Receiving permission to create a new account is provided at our sole discretion, and does not mean or imply that the disciplinary action was wrong or without cause.
- You are prohibited from receiving our products, services, or software under applicable law.
Noncompliance with these rules will result in posts which are edited or deleted, and accounts actioned with warnings, infractions or bans.
SSIM, its owners, and staff will not be held responsible for any advice given or posts made on this site. All advice given or posts made reflect the views and opinions of the poster.

Language

You may post articles or blog posts in languages other than English (content other than English is not officially supported at this time), but an accompanying translation in English must be provided within the same article or blog post or the content will be flagged and removed. We will modify this rule policy later on once our services are ready to handle languages other than English, being able to support languages worldwide is absolutely our intent and goal.

Permitted and Unpermitted Use

You may use SSIM in accordance with these Terms for either your personal and non-commercial use, or for the internal use of your non-profit religious organization. All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by SSIM. You agree you are not permitted and will not use SSIM as follows:

in any way that violates any federal, state, local, or international law or regulation.
for the purpose of exploiting, harming, or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way by exposing them to inappropriate content, asking for personally identifiable information, or otherwise.
to impersonate or attempt to impersonate any company or person, including SSIM staff or any other SSIM user.
to engage in any other conduct which, as determined by us, may harm SSIM, SSIM services, users of SSIM, or expose them to liability.
in any manner that could disable, overburden, damage, or impair SSIM, SSIM services or interfere with any other person’s use of SSIM services.
use any robot, spider, or other automatic device, process, or means to access SSIM, or SSIM services for any purpose, including monitoring or copying any of the material on SSIM and SSIM services.
to introduce any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, logic bombs, or other material which is malicious or technologically harmful.
to attempt to gain unauthorized access to, interfere with, damage, or disrupt any parts of SSIM or any server, computer, or database connected to SSIM and SSIM services.
to attack SSIM or SSIM services via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of-service attack; and otherwise attempt to interfere with the proper working of SSIM.

You also agree that you will not send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use, or re-use any material which:

contains any material which is defamatory, obscene, indecent, abusive, offensive, harassing, violent, hateful, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable;
promotes sexually explicit or pornographic material, violence, or discrimination on any basis, including that based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age;
infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other intellectual property or other rights of any other person;
violates the legal rights (including the rights of publicity and privacy) of others or contains any material that could give rise to any civil or criminal liability under laws or regulations;
promotes any illegal activity, or advocates, promotes, or assists any unlawful act;
involves commercial activities or sales, such as contests, sweepstakes, and other sales promotions, barter, or advertising; and/or gives the impression that the material emanates from or is endorsed by SSIM or any other person or entity, if this is not the case.

User Contributions

SSIM services contain interactive features that allow users to post, submit, publish, display, or transmit to other users or other persons content or materials (collectively, “User Contributions”) on or through SSIM services. However, we do not undertake to review User Contributions or any other material before it is posted on or through SSIM services, and cannot ensure prompt removal of objectionable material after it has been posted. So, we assume no liability for any action or inaction regarding transmissions, communications, or content provided by any user or third party.

All User Contributions must comply with these Terms. By providing any User Contribution on or through SSIM services, you grant us and our service providers, and each of their and our respective licensees, successors, and assigns, the right to use, reproduce, modify, perform, display, license, distribute, and otherwise disclose to third parties any such material in order to offer SSIM and our services. You represent and warrant that you own or control all rights in and to the User Contributions and have the right to grant this license and that all of your User Contributions do and will comply with these Terms. We are not responsible or liable to any third party for the content or accuracy of any User Contributions posted by you or any other user of SSIM.

Rights and Ownership

You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through SSIM services.

Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through SSIM services, you grant SSIM and our services a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on SSIM and SSIM services.

SSIM needs this license because you own your content, and SSIM therefore can’t display it across its various surfaces (i.e., mobile, web) without your permission.

This type of license also is needed to distribute your content across our Services. For example, you post an article or blog on SSIM. It is reproduced as versions on both our website and app, and distributed to multiple places within SSIM, such as the homepage or feed page. A modification might be that we show a snippet of your work (and not the full post) in a preview, with attribution to you. A derivative work might be a list of top publishers or quotes on SSIM that uses portions of your content, again with full attribution. This license applies to our Services only, and does not grant us any permissions outside of our Services.

So long as you comply with these Terms, SSIM gives you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, and non-assignable license to access and use our services.

Services are protected by any copyrights and trademarks held by SSIM, and other US and foreign laws. These Terms don’t grant you any right, title or interest in the services, other users’ content on the services, or SSIM trademarks, logos or other brand features.

Separate and apart from the content you submit, post or display on our Services, we welcome feedback, including any comments, ideas and suggestions you have about our Services. We may use this feedback for any purpose, in our sole discretion, without any obligation to you. We may treat feedback as nonconfidential.

We may stop providing the Services or any of its features within our sole discretion. We also retain the right to create limits on use and storage and may remove or limit content distribution on the Services.

Transfer and Processing of Data

In order for us to provide our Services, you agree that we may process, transfer and store information about you in the US and other countries, where you may not have the same rights and protections as you do under local law.

Account Security

SSIM allows users to create an account (“Members”) which requires providing certain information to SSIM. If you choose or are provided with a user name, password, or similar information as part of our security procedures, you agree to treat such information as confidential, and agree to notify us immediately of any unauthorized access to or use of your username or password or any other breach of security. We have the right to disable any user name, password, or other identifier, whether chosen by you or provided by us, at any time if, in our opinion, you have violated any provision of these Terms.

Monitoring and Enforcement; Legal Compliance; Termination

You agree that we have the right to:

take any action with respect to any user, Member account, or User Contribution that we deem necessary or appropriate in our sole discretion if we believe there to be a violation of these Terms, infringement of third-party rights, a threat to the personal safety of others, or a threat, liability, or harm to the goodwill associated with SSIM and our services;
take appropriate action, including without limitation, referral to law enforcement and disclosure of your information, for any illegal or unauthorized use of SSIM or our services; and/or
terminate or suspend your access to all or part of SSIM and our services for any or no reason, including without limitation, any violation of these Terms.
Without limiting the foregoing, we have the right to fully cooperate with any law enforcement authorities or court order requesting or directing us to disclose the identity or other information of anyone posting any materials on or through SSIM and SSIM services. YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS SSIM AND ITS LICENSEES AND SERVICE PROVIDERS AND ALL OF THEIR EMPLOYEES, OFFICERS, AND DIRECTORS FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY ANY OF THE FOREGOING PARTIES DURING OR AS A RESULT OF LEGAL INVESTIGATIONS AND FROM ANY ACTIONS TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER SSIM OR LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.

Your Reliance on Information

The information presented on or through SSIM is made available solely for general information purposes. Although we strive to provide information found on SSIM in various languages, translations to languages other than English of SSIM content are provided to us by other parties and we do not represent or warrant the accuracy of those translations. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of this information. Any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk. We disclaim all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on such materials by you or any other visitor to SSIM, or by anyone who may be informed of any of its contents.

Intellectual Property Rights

SSIM and its contents, features, and functionality (including but not limited to all information, software, text, displays, images, video, and audio, and the design, selection, and arrangement of the same), are owned by SSIM, its licensors, or other providers of such material and are protected by United States and international copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, and other intellectual property or proprietary rights laws.

Third Party Links and Services

SSIM may include content or links to other sites or resources provided by third parties. We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources, and accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them. If you decide to access any of the third-party websites linked to SSIM, you do so entirely at your own risk and subject to the terms and conditions of use for such websites. All statements and/or opinions expressed in these materials, and all articles and responses to questions and other content, other than the content provided by SSIM, are solely the opinions and the responsibility of the person or entity providing those materials. These materials do not necessarily reflect the opinion of SSIM. We are not responsible or liable to you or any third party for the content or accuracy of any materials provided by any third parties.

Geographic Restrictions

SSIM is based in the state of California in the United States. We make no claims that SSIM, SSIM services or any of its content is accessible or appropriate outside of the United States. Access to SSIM may not be legal by certain persons or in certain countries. If you access SSIM from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local laws.

Disclaimer of Warranties

YOUR USE OF SSIM, AND SSIM SERVICES, ITS CONTENT, AND ANY FUNCTIONALITY, SERVICES, OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH SSIM IS AT YOUR OWN RISK, ALL OF WHICH ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER SSIM NOR ANY PERSON ASSOCIATED WITH SSIM MAKES ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION WITH RESPECT TO THE COMPLETENESS, SECURITY, RELIABILITY, QUALITY, ACCURACY, OR AVAILABILITY OF SSIM. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, NEITHER SSIM NOR ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH SSIM REPRESENTS OR WARRANTS THAT SSIM OR ANY FUNCTIONALITY CONTENT OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH SSIM WILL BE ACCURATE, RELIABLE, ERROR-FREE, OR UNINTERRUPTED, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, THAT SSIM OR THE SERVER THAT MAKES IT AVAILABLE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT SSIM OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH SSIM WILL OTHERWISE MEET YOUR NEEDS OR EXPECTATIONS.

SSIM HEREBY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY WARRANTIES WHICH CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Limitation on Liability

IN NO EVENT WILL SSIM, ITS LICENSORS, SERVICE PROVIDERS, OR ANY OF THEIR EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OFFICERS, OR DIRECTORS BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, UNDER ANY LEGAL THEORY, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE, OR INABILITY TO USE, SSIM, ANY WEBSITES LINKED TO IT, ANY CONTENT OFFERED ON OR THROUGH SSIM, OR SUCH OTHER WEBSITES OR ANY SERVICES OR ITEMS OBTAINED THROUGH SSIM, INCLUDING ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PERSONAL INJURY, PAIN AND SUFFERING, EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, LOSS OF REVENUE, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, LOSS OF USE, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF DATA, AND WHETHER CAUSED BY TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), BREACH OF CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF FORESEEABLE.

THE FOREGOING DOES NOT AFFECT ANY LIABILITY WHICH CANNOT BE EXCLUDED OR LIMITED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless SSIM, its affiliates, licensors, and service providers, and its respective officers, directors, employees, contractors, agents, licensors, suppliers, successors, and assigns from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, judgments, awards, losses, costs, expenses, or fees (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to your violation of these Terms or your use of SSIM including, but not limited to, your User Contributions, any use of SSIM content, services, and products other than as expressly authorized in these Terms or your use of any information obtained from SSIM.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

All matters, disputes, or claims relating to SSIM and these Terms (including non-contractual disputes or claims), shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the internal laws of the State of California without giving effect to any choice or conflict of law provision or rule. Any legal suit, action or proceeding arising out of, or related to, these Terms or SSIM shall be instituted exclusively in the federal courts of the United States or the courts of the State of California in each case located in the City of Orange, Orange County. By agreeing to these Terms and using SSIM, you waive any and all objections to the exercise of jurisdiction over you by such courts and to venue in such courts.

Waiver and Severability

SSIM may only waive its rights under these Terms in writing. If any provision of these Terms is held by a court or other tribunal of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable for any reason, such provision shall be eliminated or limited to the minimum extent such that the remaining provisions of these Terms will continue in full force and effect.

Entire Agreement

These Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy, our Statement of Faith and our Community Guidelines constitute the sole and entire agreement between you and Stepping Stones International Ministry with respect to SSIM and its services, and supersede all prior and contemporaneous understandings, agreements, representations, and warranties, both written and oral, with respect to SSIM.

Your Comments and Concerns

SSIM and its services are operated by Stepping Stones International Ministry, a California non-profit. All feedback, comments, requests for technical support and other communications relating to SSIM should be directed to: SSIM Support, [email protected].