Maureen and I attended a church earlier this year (we had a web site up, and introduced ourselves to them). I received an email this morning from the pastor stating he wanted "to develop a website." I had assigned them a real, top level domain. If you search on Google and Yahoo for this church in their city and state, the domain comes up as the first website in the list. I reminded him of the domain name and offered it to them to keep if they wanted it. I also asked for some more information on what their requirements were. The next response I received was: Please desrequard my earlier request. "My missionary son helped me register churchnamebaptistcitystate.org. Thanks anyway. We'll be building our page soon and any advise is more than welcome."
My first advice would have been to register a shorter name! The was no reason to register such a long domain name. Using Victory Baptist Church as a church name (this church is not a Victory Baptist Church) and using Garland Texas as the location, which is better, "victorybaptistgarlandtexas.org" or "vbcgarland.org?" The Bible tells us: Prov 11:14 Where no counsel [is], the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors [there is] safety. Would it be wiser to ask before decisions are made as opposed to cleaning things up after the fact? We will help any way we can, but I suspect the son is not looking for any guidance. Don't get me wrong, they will probably have a great website that is God Honoring, but they could have hit the ground at the top of the search engines with an established domain.
