Is Your Ministry Connected to a Pornography Website?
I have preached on the importance of maintaining your ministry’s domains time and again. Many ministries have addiction recovery programs, and pornography addiction is a major problem in our society and churches today. Are you trying to help people with addictions to porn, but inadvertently leading them to porn sites?
Ministries today have no problem is dropping domains, changing domains, letting domains expire with little thought of consequences. Some scenarios:
- A new Pastor comes in, registers a new domain, doesn’t even try to take over an existing domain
- An old Pastor leaves, on bad terms, refuses to give the domain back to the church.
- A Pastor allows a church member free reign over the ministry’s website and that member separate’s from the church on less than friendly terms, refusing to give the website back to the church.
- You pay a company to set up a website and then simply stop paying the company and walk away from it. The website expires, and then the company either won’t release the domain to you or simply releases it to the public.
- Or something as simple as just deciding you don’t need a regular website any more – you are just going to a Facebook website.
Your domain can be out there on newspaper articles, Yelp, Google, Facebook, personal websites, Church Lists, Old Flyers, on your bus, church sign etc.
Worst case scenario, you have your domain printed everywhere, all your literature and you “accidentally” let it expire. No one notices it and someone else registers it, puts up a porn website and now all your literature has a pornography website on it. A major expense to get everything changed? Yes. But what about all the literature that is already out there? What about the person with the pornography addiction that goes to your website? Will God be pleased?
I was going through the Baptist Ministries Database today (Baptist-ministries.org) checking links. A church in Arkansas’ domain had expired. The link is now a full blown porn site. The church has a Facebook Page. The church’s Facebook Page is STILL LINKED TO THE PORN SITE!!!!!
I sent a message to the church on Facebook letting them know and their response was: “Oh my goodness. I’m not sure how that happened. We paid our domain fee. Thanks for letting me know!” The domain had been re-registered a month ago! It’s current owner is in Moscow Russia.
Three other church listings are linked to the porn site (I contacted each of them and let them know). Several public website (Manta, Buzzfile etc.) show that ministry’s website.
Is Your Ministry Connected to a Pornography Website? This ministry is, and will be for some time to come!
It could be worse. Some of these websites also put up malware that claim to pull pictures off your camera on your computer. They can get your passwords, and your email address and “proof” that you have visited a porn site. So, you can also be sending someone (or find yourself being sent) into a compromising situation, or at the least have your account information compromised, and/or have malware installed on your computer.
These threats are real! If you have a website you need to take the ownership of these domains seriously!
If you want to change domain names, you can usually “park” multiple domain names, you do not need to make the old domain names go away. Most domain names cost between $10-14 a year now (at ekklesia-online.com, our registry you can get a .com for $8.99 a year).
You should also make sure you run an Antivirus program on your computer. Comodo, and AVG offer good free antivirus programs.
If you are going to let your domain go away, do a search to see how wide spread it is in the search engines and see if you can minimize the impact. The last thing you need is to have Your Ministry Connected to a Pornography Website!
Lastly, if your website has links to other ministries, I would STRONGLY suggest that you go through and check your links every so often and make sure that YOU are not linked to an undesirable site. Make sure that the your answer to the question Is Your Ministry Connected to a Pornography Website? Is NO!
