Notes:

I am very sorry to tell you this but your domain name expired and no one has seen your web site for some time. I do not have your web site, but it is possible it is available on the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that tries to archive as much of the Internet as it can.  Your web host might also still have it.  I only know about the domain, and if I have it then it has been expired for at least a few months.

Your domain expired, and became available to the public. I happened to notice and registered it before anyone else. I would be very happy if you would take it back and put up a site, or tell the UMC that you no longer have a web site, or update their link with your current site. Then I will let your domain expire again and this will all be a distant memory!

Domains are subscriptions, and they need to be renewed annually. For obvious reasons this affects a lot of Methodist churches. It is no big deal - your domain expired, and I happened to see it and bought it for now. You are very welcome to have it back, and in fact that will free up my budget for this project to redeem some other church's domain when they make the same mistake!

You have good instincts, hold onto that! If you don't want your old domain from me and would rather switch to something new: that is awesome and is exactly what I want for you. Please update the UMC registry with your new domain and I will let your old domain go away when it is time, no contact necessary.

You are probably here because your domain expired. Send me a note at the link above and I will help you get set back up. This is a hobby for me, not an occupation, so please plan to be patient.

If you want to get a flavor of what I might suggest you can always read the other questions!

If the domain is not expired or just recently expired, you might be able to keep it. Send me a text ASAP because time will be of the essence.

Unfortunately almost certainly not. Most of those sites charge real money to redeem domains, and of course anyone could buy the domain and do something else with it - which, frankly, is what I am doing too, except that I just hold it in trust for you! If you are really desperate there are certain rules around trademarks, and if you have a lot invested in advertising your domain it is likely that you would prevail over an obvious spam site at ICANN and be able to force a domain transfer - but I have never actually participated in this kind of thing, and to be honest would recommend any congregation accept the pain of switching to some other domain before taking the ICANN path.

Domains cost on the order of $10 per year. That's not a lot but if you are buying a bunch it adds up fast. I have a monthly and an annual budget for the project; at the moment I am not sure if I will drop the oldest ones after the year, or keep on renewing them and accept that as the most I can help. For now I am just buying until I hit my monthly budget, by expanding the search radius from my home ZIP code.

Great plan! That is awesome - please update your registration at UMC.org with this information. You could let me know or I will double-check at renewal time - each purchase is for a year so that is how long I will "own" it. If you let me know the page you would like to use I am happy to set up a redirect until my renewal expires.

I have a very small web server that runs my own stuff and that is all. However, if you send me a very simple Word document, with a picture or two at most, I can put that up as a static site for you. Alternatively I can set up a redirect to Facebook or some other site. I will not enable JavaScript or PHP or give you a database, nor will I make changes quickly or frequently - so please plan to leave your static page alone for months / years at a time!

If you go this route I would still like to transfer the domain to your congregation - I will send you a document telling you exactly what you need to do, and you will need to pay for a renewal for another year, and then we can do the transfer which will take some time. You will then need to make arrangements to have the church pay for renewals in the future. This is to free up resources for other congregations, and also to encourage your church to remember the web site as a ministry and maintain it faithfully as the sacred property it is.

No. However, you can; Google as of this writing has a very generous nonprofit benefit that we are using at my home church, and I am happy to send you some information about how to set up the same. It will let you get email through the regular gmail.com interface but with emails like [email protected]. Administration is not especially technical. If you want to go this route you really should have ownership of the domain beforehand; send me a note.

Great! I also think you should have something nice, and if you look around and realize you can afford a real web service I think you should do that instead of relying on my spare capacity. I am happy to transfer your domain, and you can point it to Weebly or Wix or whoever is cool now. I would encourage you NOT to transfer it to those folks, because they tend to swallow domains when you stop using their services; I will be happy to send you instructions for what I would recommend and do at my own church, but if you want to do something else I will be glad to help with that too.

Some friends of mine are UMC pastors and were appointed to churches with expired web domains in the Find-A-Church portal. I remember how much I hated looking for a church, and how hard it was to navigate when web sites were dead, so I bought up the domains for them - not only because they were my friends and when they have time I will help them get set up, but because I was afraid they would become spam sites and turn off interested congregants, which frankly would be a real shame because these folks are actually amazing ministers.

On further reflection I realized I had a certain amount of money I could dedicate to this project on a regular basis, and so I decided to check the local area to see if other congregations had similar problems. So far 5-10 percent of the churches I have checked have expired domains or dead sites in the registry, and I have been able to redeem about half of them.

I am not accepting donations. I am not set up to take your money, so do not ask and please do not send it to me. This is just a way I am practicing stewardship. If you want to help in some way:

• The thing that helps most is for domains to go off my list and back to their home churches, or go away for good. If you have come to this page for a church, and you visit or speak to the pastor later, please let them know to check their web site so they can fix their link or contact me to get the domain back!
• If you know someone who has access to the UMC Find-A-Church registry database: I would really love to have a conversation. It would be very easy to script domain checks, expiry checks, and the like, and we could set up automatic reminders and renewals and expirations that would make our lives better.
• If you are a pastor with a domain that you know will be expiring, and you do not want to renew it, please update the UMC registry as soon as it expires. It is far better to have no site listed than one that does not work.
• If you are an itinerant minister and need someone to hold your domain in trust during a transitional period, please reach out before it expires. It is a gamble whether a spammer gets the domain once it has expired.

I am serious too: DO NOT send me money, even if I saved your bacon by rescuing your domain and you just want to pay me back for the renewal. I do not want it and it will cause me headaches. Please do not send it.

If you do have some money and think this is a mission for you, and are technical or have a technical friend, please replicate this work. My reach is basically limited to the North Carolina Conference of the UMC and the very nearby areas. Pick another region, set up a Cloudflare account and a realistic budget (it is potentially tracking forever, so if you spend $100 a month and renew everything you are allocating $1200/year indefinitely, and you are only maintaining around 120 domains). Then click through the find-a-church page for the area and try to buy domains that fail until you hit your cap!

You are welcome to redirect to or duplicate this page without further permission. If you let me know you have started working in another region I will mention it here to avoid duplicate efforts.

Contact information is above. If you do not know me then read carefully what contact methods are appropriate, and send me what you want to say via an approved mechanism. I will probably read it, but may or may not reply.