Hindu temple backpedals after erasing Lutheran church from website
Pastor: Secularism not Hinduism is the 'biggest threat to Christianity in North Texas'
FRISCO, Texas — A Lutheran church in North Texas that was erased from the website of an adjacent Hindu temple is back from the dead — sort of.
As The Christian Post reported last week, Rejoice Lutheran Church, located about 25 miles north of Dallas, was removed along with an entire residential community from the main header image of the website of the neighboring Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple.
But at some point prior to March 7, the temple replaced the image with a blurred version, rather than the previous version which completely erased the church and surrounding homes.
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Now, the Rejoice Lutheran Church building can be seen in the upper left corner — still blurred, but there nonetheless.
While the new image more accurately reflects the landscape of the corner of Eldorado and Independence parkways, it’s unclear whether the image was changed in response to CP’s report.
CP reached out to Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple for comment Thursday. This story will be updated if a response is received.
Rejoice Lutheran, which was founded in 1998 as a mission congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), has made its home here since 2009, roughly a decade before the construction began on the temple.
The image controversy is the latest turn in a relationship between Rejoice Lutheran and the Hanuman Temple which Pastor Neil White says has been “mostly positive” for the last several years — but that’s not to say things are perfect.
“It’s not going to ever be universally positive,” White told CP via phone. “I mean, there have been times we've had issues.”
One of those issues is traffic control, which, for a temple that can draw thousands of visitors for its holy days, can pose a significant challenge, particularly when visitors fill up not just the parking lots directly adjacent to the church, but also those at nearby Heritage High School and Roach Middle School.
“They can have thousands of people on a festival week and they will have thousands of people go through there,” said White. “They will fill up the field to staff, they will fill up the parking lots at the middle school and the high school across the street from us.
“It can be a bit of a nightmare at times. And you know, no matter how much the leaders of the community in the temple want to be respectful, you're not always going to have that experience. ... I'm not going to say it's always perfect, but they do try, they really do try."
Still, White said, Rejoice Lutheran was able to work together with the temple to figure it all out, laying the groundwork for an open line of communication between the two places of worship.
“There was from the very beginning of their existence here, conversation back and forth between our two communities, and that's continued,” he said.
As for the temple removing Rejoice Lutheran from its website, White said he doesn’t really look at the temple’s website too often, but when he did, he noticed it was “catered to their community.”
“So it was not structured the way that a church website would be structured,” he added.
He said he’s been asked whether he’s considered moving Rejoice Lutheran — whose building is fully owned by the church — to another part of town, and while White says that’s a possibility, he’s “not overly concerned about it.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post and the author of BACKWARDS DAD: a children's book for grownups. He can be reached at: [email protected].
