This week’s briefing tracks a widening split in how states police religious outreach — and how outreach answers back. A Moscow Region court orders 178 New Testaments destroyed because of their publisher’s imprint; a Kyrgyz investigator says the offence was “Adventist books in their homes”; meanwhile an IMB team in South Asia distributes Scripture on QR cards costing a penny each, and an Adventist leader in Kisumu tells 4,000 people that “no one can deny you a pulpit because it’s on your hand.” Maharashtra shows the limit of that escape: its new Act has left a Catholic bishop unwilling to preach that Jesus is the one Saviour. Also: Jerusalem café affair, Indonesia’s first mass certification of preachers, and Rome’s new “Church of the Sheaves” paradigm.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 29 August – 4 September 2026
A taxi driver fined in Moscow for “missionary activity” after praying alone on the tarmac. A Maine supreme court giving a father authority over whether his daughter may attend an evangelical church. Hindutva activists staging a sit-in in a Hyderabad software company’s car park over an alleged conversion attempt — where the only police complaint on file is the company’s, against the protesters. The week’s material shares a structure: the offence is constituted not by a convert but by a witness. Meanwhile Southern Baptist missionaries carried virtual-reality relationships onto Tokyo streets at the invitation of the convention’s own organisers, and Indonesian scholars asked what the sponsorship market is doing to the preacher.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 21–29 August 2026
Maharashtra’s anti-conversion law took effect on 28 August, and congregations across the state have begun asking worshippers to sign statements that they attend of their own free will — evidence manufactured in advance of an allegation nobody has made. In Palghar, twenty-two women were charged under the ordinary criminal code a week before the statute existed. Russia has designated a children’s evangelism agency an “undesirable organisation”. In Kiribati, an Adventist official explains that broadcasting evades not the state but rival pastors. Also: indigenous missionaries sent to Canada’s First Nations, a Catholic mission in Turkmenistan defining success as remaining, and Indonesian work on “algorithmic piety”.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 18–21 August 2026
Indian police in Pune charged a church leader based in Great Britain under Maharashtra’s anti-conversion law eleven days before it came into force — and the interim bail order that followed contains a rare judicial proposition: an open door is not an invitation to convert. Elsewhere, the RSS held its coordination meeting without mentioning conversion, preferring the language of demographic imbalance; Shanghai reportedly extended curbs on Catholic practice to funeral rites; a Russian court fined three Baptists for missionary activity without saying what made it missionary.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 7–18 August 2026
The convert, not the missionary, is the figure the law now reaches. An Acehnese court jailed a former Muslim for explaining his conversion on TikTok; a Nigerian federal court told Kano’s Hisbah it has no jurisdiction over a woman who left Islam; ten Catholics walked free in Rajasthan after 104 days in jail for defending their own Mass. In Moscow, a hostel was fined 100,000 roubles for “unlawful missionary activity” because migrant guests kept prayer mats. In Abuja, Nigeria’s Salafi da’wa movement signed peace protocols with northern Christian leaders under Muslim World League patronage.
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