Hindu temple backpedals after erasing Lutheran church from website
As the city of Frisco has exploded in population, from a town of about 3,500 residents in 1980 to a sprawling suburb with more than 200,000 as of 2023, so has its South Asian population which comprises about 22% of Frisco’s population — roughly four times the rest of the state of Texas.
But it’s not just the growing number of software and technology companies making their way to North Texas that’s attracting Indian immigration.
In 2008, a well-known Hindu priest, according to The Associated Press, is said to have visited the area and blessed land located on Independence Parkway, not far from the temple’s location.
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White said it’s that combination that has transformed this 70-square-mile stretch of Collin County.
“There's a large Indian population that lives right around us and you see it in the shops around here,” he said. “There's a bakery or a butcher shop that specializes in things for Indian customers. There is a travel agency that's specifically for traveling to India. There's an Indian wedding shop.
With such a high-density foreign population, one might think the opportunities for evangelism abound.
White says, however, that’s not quite the case.
For one, he explained, Hindus, unlike Christians, do not have a common worship time, but rather tend to come to the temple at their leisure throughout the day.
“Part of it is just the reality that they do things very differently,” he said, pointing to the temple’s lack of a common worship time as in most churches. "It's not that people don't come up and pray or visit throughout the week, but most of our people are there [at the church] during these very specific times where we have an event scheduled.”
The greatest and most obvious difference, White added, isn’t when they worship, but whom they worship.
While the Hanuman Temple is replete with statues of various Hindu deities — or what most Evangelicals would likely call “idols” — White says their view of God, while divergent from Protestant Christianity, is more nuanced than what most Evangelicals might think.
“We believe there is one God and we believe we've come to know that God through Jesus Christ, right? And for Hindus, you know, they would say, if you ask them very deeply, they'll say, oh yeah, there's one experience of God, or however you want to talk about that, but there are many experiences of that, of God throughout the world,” he explained.
“So they would look at Jesus as one among many.”
And while the physical proximity of the two houses of worship hasn’t always been smooth sailing, White said he views it as “kind of an opportunity to share what it is about my faith and our faith that is important.”
“I do feel like I've had a couple of windows and I've had some time to be able to go over there and share some of what I believe,” he said, not in a way that it was, you know, trying to cater what I believe to the way they would talk about it, but because genuinely there has been curiosity on their side …
“We've had opportunities to go over there and let them talk about what they believe, not in a way to try to get our people to be more Hindu or their people to be more Christian, but just to be able to plant those seeds.”
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].
