Anytime I get a chance to learn a lesson from another church, I get my pen out. I can’t write fast enough in an effort to avoid a future problem. Well, here is real simple lesson that can be learned free of charge to any of those that can find our new home.

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It’s real simple: Don’t let your web domain expire because companies in Taiwan will buy it and hold it hostage. Hostage may not be the right word. That would involve some type of negotiation and we can’t get anyone to call us back. Nevertheless, there are people smarter than we are that now have our old web address.

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As our church grows we are less focused on fixing the problem and more focused on fixing the system that caused the problem. So what did we learn from this one? Here are a few departmental shifts we’ll make to fix the problem not just treat the symptoms.

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1. Human Resource Department- Anytime an employee leaves the company for whatever reason we must have a systematic way to receive and filter future emails to their address.
2. Communications Department- We must, at all times, have a running spreadsheet of all websites that we currently have along with passwords, emails on file, expiration dates, etc.
3. Finance Department- Anytime we set up a credit card autodraft payment up it must be kept on a spreadsheet in the event that credit card number ever changes for any reason.
4. IT Department- They actually provide services at a very minimal cost to protect you from loosing your domain in the unfortunate event that you don’t renew.

There you have it. This was not an expensive lesson we learned- just a humiliating one. Here’s the headline: “Church blog designed to help other churches with practical ideas goes down because they don’t have their crap straight and they can’t even figure out how to renew a domain��?.

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Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

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