Effective Date: August 21, 2026 · Last Updated: August 21, 2026
VIA is a faith-centered community for people 16 and older to explore Scripture, prayer, testimony, reflection, spiritual growth, and meaningful connection with others.
VIA is intended to be a place for sincere faith conversations and community—not a place for harassment, exploitation, manipulation, sexual misconduct, scams, or abuse.
These Community Guidelines explain the standards we expect from everyone using VIA's community and social features.
These Guidelines supplement the VIA Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, AI Use & AI Privacy Notice, Age & Child Safety Policy, Safety & Reporting Policy, and other applicable policies.
VIA aims to foster a community where people can:
We want people to be able to express sincere beliefs without fear of being personally attacked or manipulated.
At the same time, participation in a faith community does not excuse harassment, coercion, exploitation, threats, abuse, or other harmful conduct.
These Guidelines apply to user conduct across VIA, including:
Private communication is not exempt from these rules.
A violation does not become permissible simply because it occurs in a private message rather than a public post.
VIA welcomes sincere disagreement.
Users may disagree about:
You may critique an idea, teaching, interpretation, or practice.
You may not use disagreement as an excuse to attack, demean, threaten, humiliate, or harass another person.
Examples of prohibited conduct include:
Respectful theological debate is permitted.
Harassment disguised as theological debate is not.
Do not use VIA to harass, intimidate, bully, or repeatedly target another person.
Prohibited conduct includes:
A single disagreement or negative opinion is not automatically harassment.
Context matters, including the frequency, severity, intent, and surrounding conduct.
Do not threaten, encourage, glorify, coordinate, or facilitate real-world violence.
This includes:
Religious language does not make a threat acceptable.
Statements such as "God wants me to hurt you" or similar attempts to invoke spiritual authority to justify violence are prohibited.
VIA allows people to discuss difficult experiences, including:
Sharing an experience or seeking support is not itself prohibited.
However, do not use VIA to:
When someone appears to face a serious safety or mental-health crisis, community members are encouraged to respond with compassion and encourage appropriate professional, medical, emergency, or crisis support.
Prayer and spiritual encouragement may accompany appropriate help. They should not be used as a substitute for necessary emergency or professional care.
Faith conversations are welcome on VIA.
However, spiritual authority must not be used to coerce or control another person—particularly concerning high-stakes decisions.
Do not present high-stakes directives as authoritative commands from God, Scripture, or spiritual authority when they could reasonably put someone at risk.
Examples include:
The problem is not the religious topic itself.
The concern is coercive or authoritative spiritual direction concerning serious health, safety, financial, legal, or other high-stakes matters.
Users may share personal experiences and convictions.
For example:
"I personally felt led to make this decision."
or:
"In my experience, prayer and counseling helped me."
Personal testimony is different from presenting a personal belief as a binding command for another person.
Users should distinguish between:
When discussing serious decisions, users should encourage appropriate discernment and, where relevant, qualified professional or pastoral counsel.
A disclaimer does not excuse coercive conduct.
Saying "this is just my opinion" does not make an otherwise abusive or coercive directive acceptable.
Do not exploit someone's faith, vulnerability, trust, or spiritual beliefs for personal control or advantage.
Prohibited conduct includes:
Spiritual encouragement should strengthen a person's agency, not replace it.
Users may share their own experiences.
However, do not expose or exploit another person's private circumstances without appropriate permission.
This includes sharing another person's:
Do not use someone's vulnerability as content for public humiliation, entertainment, retaliation, or engagement.
Having access to a private conversation does not automatically mean that you have permission to publish it publicly.
If you share screenshots of private conversations, remove unnecessary identifying information whenever possible, including:
Publishing private conversations to expose, shame, mobilize harassment against, or otherwise target another person may violate these Guidelines even if the conversation itself was legitimately received.
Do not publish or distribute private information for the purpose of exposing, locating, intimidating, or targeting another person.
Prohibited conduct includes:
Do not retaliate by publishing another person's information.
VIA is a faith community, not a dating platform.
Users may discuss:
These discussions are permitted when they are genuinely about faith, experience, support, or community.
However, do not use VIA as a dating or romantic prospecting service.
Prohibited conduct includes:
VIA does not prohibit users from having ordinary relationships that develop naturally outside the platform.
The rule concerns behavior conducted through VIA, not users' private lives.
Do not use VIA to create, distribute, request, solicit, or facilitate sexual content or sexual exploitation.
This includes:
Faith-based, romantic, humorous, educational, or other framing does not excuse prohibited sexual conduct.
VIA is a 16+ service.
Users must meet the applicable minimum age requirement to use VIA.
Adults must not use VIA to pursue romantic or sexual relationships with minors.
Prohibited conduct includes:
Adult-to-minor interactions may receive heightened safety scrutiny where circumstances indicate elevated risk.
Suspected child sexual exploitation or grooming should be reported immediately.
VIA may allow legitimate fundraising and giving-related activity, but financial solicitation must be transparent and non-coercive.
Users engaging in solicitation should clearly explain:
Do not disguise a financial solicitation as:
Do not pressure someone after they decline.
Do not use VIA to facilitate financial abuse.
Prohibited conduct includes:
User-run fundraising is not automatically endorsed, verified, or guaranteed by VIA unless VIA expressly states otherwise.
Do not use VIA to flood users or communities with repetitive or unwanted commercial content.
Prohibited conduct includes:
Commercial activity that VIA expressly permits must be presented transparently and in accordance with applicable platform rules.
Do not impersonate another person, organization, church, ministry, company, public figure, or VIA representative in a deceptive manner.
Prohibited conduct includes:
Parody or clearly identifiable fictional content may be treated differently when it is not reasonably likely to deceive users.
Be cautious when another user:
Report suspected scams rather than attempting to investigate, expose, or retaliate against the account yourself.
Do not manipulate another user into doing something through:
A person's faith, grief, confession, prayer request, financial hardship, or emotional vulnerability must not be treated as leverage.
VIA's community standards apply to direct messages as well as public content.
Users should use message requests and connection controls responsibly.
Do not:
Private communication is not a safe harbor for prohibited conduct.
Users should be able to use available blocking and connection controls to protect themselves.
If someone asks you to stop contacting them, respect that request.
Do not circumvent a block by:
Circumventing a block may itself be considered harassment.
VIA may provide faith-specific reactions such as Amen and Praying.
These features should be used in good faith.
Do not use reactions to:
Shared spaces are intended for constructive community participation.
Group or community administrators may establish additional reasonable rules for their spaces, provided those rules do not conflict with VIA's Terms or Community Guidelines.
Users remain subject to VIA's platform-wide rules even when participating in a privately managed group or community.
Administrators should not use their authority to facilitate:
VIA welcomes people from different Christian traditions and backgrounds.
Do not target people with harassment, threats, or dehumanizing abuse based on protected characteristics or other personal characteristics.
Theological disagreement is permitted.
A user may criticize a religious doctrine, interpretation, denomination, or practice.
However, criticism does not permit targeted abuse of individual members.
Users who hold positions of trust—including pastors, ministry leaders, group leaders, mentors, or other authority figures—must not exploit that position through VIA.
Do not use perceived spiritual authority to:
Being a pastor, leader, mentor, or spiritually knowledgeable user does not grant permission to violate another person's boundaries.
VIA's AI features are intended to provide non-authoritative, educational, devotional, and informational assistance.
AI output may be inaccurate.
Users should not treat AI output as:
Users should independently evaluate important AI-generated information.
AI should not be used as a justification for coercive or harmful conduct.
Users should report content or interactions that appear to violate these Guidelines.
Examples include:
Where a reporting function is available, select the reason that most closely matches the concern and provide useful context.
Avoid submitting unnecessary sensitive information in a report.
When a user reports content or an interaction, VIA may review:
Authorized personnel may review reported material when reasonably necessary for:
VIA does not represent that authorized personnel routinely read private conversations.
VIA may review reported interactions and surrounding context when reasonably necessary for the purposes described above.
Reports must be made in good faith.
Do not knowingly submit false, fraudulent, retaliatory, or abusive reports to:
A report that turns out to be mistaken is not automatically a violation.
The concern is knowingly abusing the reporting system.
Where available, users may appeal eligible moderation or enforcement decisions.
An appeal should explain why the decision should be reconsidered and provide relevant information.
VIA may maintain reasonable limitations on:
Not every decision will necessarily be eligible for appeal.
VIA is not an emergency response service.
Do not wait for VIA, a moderator, or an AI feature to respond when someone appears to face an immediate threat of serious physical harm or another emergency.
Contact appropriate emergency services, crisis resources, medical professionals, mental-health professionals, law enforcement, or other qualified assistance appropriate to the situation.
Community members should not attempt to handle an immediate emergency solely through prayer, messaging, or a platform report.
Prayer and spiritual support can accompany appropriate emergency or professional assistance.
When reporting serious conduct, users may provide relevant evidence such as:
Do not fabricate evidence.
Do not misleadingly alter screenshots or conversations.
If information is redacted to protect privacy, users may indicate that it has been redacted.
Do not include unnecessary sensitive information.
Users are responsible for protecting their VIA accounts.
Do not share:
If you believe your account has been compromised:
If you discover a potential VIA security vulnerability:
Report security vulnerabilities through the appropriate VIA security contact.
VIA cannot guarantee that:
Users remain responsible for exercising reasonable judgment and protecting their own boundaries and information.
We may update these Guidelines as:
If VIA introduces new social or community functionality, additional feature-specific rules may supplement these Guidelines.
The general Guidelines will continue to provide the baseline standards unless a more specific rule applies.
These Community Guidelines should be read together with:
Together, these policies establish the standards governing participation in VIA.
VIA is built around faith, reflection, prayer, Scripture, and meaningful connection.
Be truthful. Be respectful. Respect people's boundaries. Protect vulnerable people. Do not weaponize faith. Do not exploit trust.
You may disagree.
You may challenge an idea.
You may share your testimony.
You may hold strong convictions.
But you may not use VIA to harass, manipulate, exploit, threaten, sexually target, financially exploit, or spiritually coerce another person.
When something goes wrong:
Protect yourself → Set boundaries → Block when appropriate → Report the conduct → Preserve relevant evidence → Seek appropriate help when necessary.
Our goal is not to eliminate disagreement from a faith community. It is to make room for honest disagreement without turning disagreement into abuse.