DOVER, NH — The Hope Community Church calls itself “An Advent Christian Congregation.” For a short time, its discarded website called itself by names that members of the congregation speak only in their most secret thoughts.When the church decided to move its service to another ISP, pastor Steve Spearing figured that nothing very interesting was likely to happen to its domain, what with the words “life” and “Christ” in its name and the church still in business. Unknown to him, the URL went up on the auction block — and a porn company bought it.

The news of the transfer came to Spearing not from his previous ISP, but from a Massachusetts woman browsing churches in the area in preparation for a move there.

“She asked what kind of a church we were and then said, ‘Do you know that your website is connected to a porn site,” Spearing explains. “And I said, ‘No, ma’am.”

Naturally, pastor Spearing was horrified by the news, particularly given the fact that his church had recently promoted the site at the Dover Apple Harvest Day by distributing fliers.

After several weeks of wondering how the church’s site had been sold underneath him, Spearing received a letter from his previous ISP admitting that it had accidentally cut the domain free and sold it to a smut peddler.

“They said we could buy it back, but we don’t want it back,” the pastor admits, adding that the ISP told him porn sites often look for discarded church web addresses. “They will target ministries as an embarrassment — and they did a good job.”

But all’s well that ends well. The Hope Community Church has a new site at www.HopeACC.org and pastor Spearing says “It will be interesting to see who shows up to church now.”