About 50 residents gathered outside a new church in Taman Medan, Petaling Jaya on Sunday to demand that the cross affixed to the house of worship be removed as it was "challenging Islam", The Star Online reported today.
According to the news portal, the locals demonstrated peacefully during the church service at 10am for the cross to be taken down.
The protesters said the presence of a cross in a Muslim-majority area posed a challenge to the religion and could sway the faith of the youth, The Star Online reported.
The news portal reported a village leader later pacified the group and spoke with the church's priest on their behalf.
"After meeting with the priest, the church agreed to take down the cross by next Sunday. If they have the authority to run, we cannot stop it," the group's leader, Abdullah Abu Bakar, was quoted as saying.
"But we ask out of concern, being a Malay area, that they take down the cross."
Police reportedly arrived on the scene at 10:30am to manage the crowd, just as the Sunday service was ending.
The Star Online reported that the cross was taken down by church leaders a few hours after the protest.
The Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) said the protest was politically-motivated to stir up religious tensions in Selangor.
CCM general-secretary Reverend Dr Hermen Shastri, in condemning the protest, said that the council was not surprised that such an incident had taken place yet again in the state, which is ruled by the federal opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat.
"It is obvious that there is a political agenda behind such acts from certain quarters, who are out to instigate and increase inter-religious tensions in the state," he said in a statement on Monday. "The CCM wishes to register its discontent and displeasure, at the way a small group of demonstrators at Taman Medan had taken the law into their own hands, by disrupting the worship of a church and making religiously insensitive demands that pertain to the sacred symbol of Christians.”
The council also called on authorities "to take firm measures against anyone, who seeks to disrupt the worship of others, and, seek to act above the law by imposing their religious views, upon people of other faiths, by show of mob force".
This was not the first time a protest was held against a church. On November 2, 2014, Muslim NGO, Pertubuhan Sahabat organized a demonstration to protest the construction of the four-storey Praise Emmanuel Assembly church in Petaling Jaya.
The NGO said there were already three churches in the vicinity, adding it was not appropriate in a neighborhood that counted 70 percent of its residents as Muslim.
The group had demonstrated at the church building site, saying that building a four-storey church in the area would be an insult to the Muslims living there.
Original story: Locals protest outside church building, say cross ‘challenging Islam’ and Cross protest politically-motivated, says Council of Churches
Source: The Malaysian Insider