hosting - Can an organisation take over a domain?

Basically I am working with a church who has a new pastor. The churches website hosting is paid by the church bank account and the domain name is up for renewal. The company are telling us that the previous pastor (the registrar) must be the one who renews the domain. As the old pastor is in another country we can't get old of him.

I looked on whois and the "Trading as" tag was set to the name of the church. So although the old pastor is the owner of the domain, is there no way that the church can renew the domain? We can prove that the church pastor has changed within the last two years. The hosting company have no problem billing them for the hosting, it's just the domain name we can't do anything with. We are not trying to transfer the domain either.

I will be looking forward to hearing back from you all.

UPDATE

We don't have access to the cPanel and we don't have access to the ewbsite with a username or password, that is what the old pastor has.

Peter

Answer

Domain ownership (and hence, who has the authority to effect changes to its registration) is mantained by ICANN (or RIPE in Europe).

A whois query will show you the administrative contact for the domain; this can be an individual, or an organisation, or a RIR or LIR (these have handles instead of names).

Any of the registered contacts for your domain should be able to contact the registrar and ask them to update the registry details.

If the registry entry does not have multiple contacts listed, you can apply to the registrar to alter the registration by showing them you are authorized to act on behalf of the domain owner.

If one person who is no longer available is the domain owner, I doubt they will allow you to trivially change it.

Collect as much detailed information as you can and make a case that you really need to take over the domain; it is ultimately in the hands of the registrar, but if the domain has expired, you have a much better chance of transferring ownership.

And yes, you DO want to transfer the domain; that's what changing ownership means.