Pastor: Secularism is the biggest threat to Christianity in North Texas

FRISCO, Texas — A North Texas Lutheran church that was deleted from the website of an adjacent Hindu temple has come back from the dead — sort of.

As the Christian Post says 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 Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple website neighbor.

But at some point before March 7, the temple replaced the image with a blurry versionrather than the previous version which completely erased the church and surrounding houses.

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Today, the Rejoice Lutheran Church building is visible in the upper left corner – still blurred, but present nonetheless.

Although the new image more accurately reflects the landscape at the corner of Eldorado and Independence drives, it is unclear whether the image was changed in response to the CP report.

CP contacted the Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple for comments on Thursday. This story will be updated if a response is received.

Rejoice Lutheran, founded in 1998 as a missionary congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), has called home here since 2009, about a decade before construction of the temple began.

The controversy over the image is the latest twist in a relationship between Rejoice Lutheran and Hanuman Temple that Pastor Neil White says has been “pretty positive” in recent years — but that doesn’t mean things are perfect.

“It’s never going to be universally positive,” White told CP by phone. “I mean, there were times when we had problems.”

One such issue is traffic control, which, for a temple that can attract thousands of visitors during its holy days, can pose a significant challenge, especially when visitors fill not only the parking lots directly adjacent to the church, but also those located nearby. close to Heritage High School and Roach Middle School.

“They can accommodate thousands of people during a festival week and thousands of people will pass through,” White said. “They will fill the field for the staff, they will fill the middle and high school parking lots opposite our house.

“It can be a bit of a nightmare sometimes. And you know, no matter how respectful the temple community leaders want to be, you won’t always have that experience. …I’m not going to say it’s always perfect, but they try, they really try. »

Still, White said, Rejoice Lutheran was able to work with the temple to figure everything out, laying the foundation for an open line of communication between the two houses of worship.

“From the beginning of their existence here, there has been exchange between our two communities, and that has continued,” he said.

As for the temple removing Rejoice Lutheran from its website, White said he doesn’t check the temple’s website very often, but when he did, he noticed it was “tailored to their community “.

“So it wasn’t structured in the same way that a church website would be,” he added.

He said he has been asked if he would consider moving Rejoice Lutheran — whose building is entirely owned by the church — to another part of town, and while White says it’s a possibility, he ” Don’t worry too much about it.”