Dear Church: Please stop hosting porn

By Christopher Mann
For ReSermon.com

I am not aware of a church that intentionally hosts pornography. 

​I am aware of many churches who have changed their URL from www.OldChurchDomain.com to the new and improved www.CoolerChurchDomain.com, and then let OldChurchDomain.com lapse into the open market of URLs, where anybody can buy it. Usually, business-minded folks will scoop up these kinds of URLs because they're betting that among the 1,000 or so discarded URLs they buy, there are a sufficient number of former owners who just forgot to renew these domains, and they're willing to pay the (legal) scalping fees of $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more to get those URLs back. It may sound slimy, but they're playing by the rules, and its all legal.

But there are many wicked businesses who buy these discarded domains for keeps and push massive amounts of porn. So for years to come, these sites are hosting and hooking new generations of porn addicts. If we're upset with factories polluting cities with toxic "brown fields" after decades of use, we're also upset with the short-sighted churches empowering pornographers to leave brown fields on the internet. 

Action

1. When you change your website to CoolerChurchDomain.com, please keep the old domain. Do everybody a favor and just keep eternally paying the $10 annual fee required to retain legal possession of OldChurchDomain.com. Think of it as taking your entire community out to Starbucks for a year.
2. Place a redirect on that old domain so that it redirects traffic to CoolerChurchDomain.com. That way, you get the ongoing benefit from your old name's traffic forever. 

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