KUALA LUMPUR, July 3 — Churches currently operating out of shop lots in the national capital may soon see their commercial land titles converted to religious land.

The authorities will reconsider changing the land titles for churches that have previously been forced to open up on shop lots, Federal Territories Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor said today.

“If you’re an Anglican church and you’re in a shop house, we can convert it to a house of worship,” he told reporters after launching the advisory committee on the Federal Territories non-Muslim houses of worship here.

He also said for new development areas in the Federal Territories, the relevant place of worship would be built depending on the majority community, and if it was a multi-racial area, a common house of worship could be constructed for non-Muslims.

Tengku Adnan expressed hopes that the committee would ensure that the authorities were sensitive in dealing with illegal houses of worship.

Disputes over the location of houses of worship have been a recurring affair, particularly in the Klang Valley where there is rapid commercial development over increasingly scarce land.

Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad said last April that the Federal Territories ministry had informed lawmakers that it was planning to set up a precise regulatory system that will manage the entire process of setting a house of worship, including the application, registration and the gazetting of land.

The PAS federal lawmaker had noted that many churches were operating out of shophouses.

The Hindu community has also seen numerous cases over the years where temples that were not gazetted as official places of worship were torn down to make way for big ticket projects in the city. One of the more recent cases was the demolition of a large part of the 101-year-old Muneswarar Kaliyaman Hindu temple in November last year, as it was situated on land meant for the construction of a 31-storey office building to be built by Menara Hap Seng Sdn Bhd.