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Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends- 31 July – 7 August 2026

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This week’s briefing opens on a paradox: Nigeria’s Senate has criminalised bus preaching — not under a religion law but under a road-safety act, and defends itself by noting the ban has sat quietly in traffic regulations since 2007. Elsewhere three traditions moved to police their own missionaries: Indonesia’s MUI certified a 49th cohort of preachers, Thailand’s overseas dhammaduta office met in Ulaanbaatar to map legal obstacles, and the IMB deployed physiotherapy where preaching is unwelcome. Plus Yad L’Achim confronts the IDF, and lay Christians outpace their pastors into AI.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 24–31 July 2026

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India’s anti-conversion laws moved from arrest to adjudication this week: a Muzaffarnagar court refused bail to twelve people seized at a prayer meeting after a Bajrang Dal tip-off. Strasbourg, meanwhile, struck down a Bulgarian ban on door-to-door preaching. Elsewhere: the Ahmadiyya Caliph announced 267,596 new adherents at Jalsa Salana UK; Texas Baptists counted 500 decisions from a World Cup campaign; Sinhala-Buddhist critics shifted from anti-conversion bills to colonial restitution; and AI is quietly ending missionary “creative access.”

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 17–24 July 2026

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This week, the initiative lay with the missionaries rather than their opponents. The Latter-day Saints crossed 87,000 missionaries and 506 missions as President Oaks defended exclusive truth as the guarantor of religious freedom; Seventh-day Adventists opened a “Creator Summit” to enlist a million member-influencers online under the banner “faithfulness over virality”; and Sri Lankan Buddhist diplomacy advanced dhammadūta through Thailand’s Dhammakaya network. Three traditions, three rival theologies of why outreach is legitimate.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 10–17 July 2026

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The European Parliament condemned forced conversion in Pakistan (9 July) — the coercive extreme of the conversion spectrum. Against it, the RSS-affiliated Organiser and Sinhala-Buddhist LankaWeb turn the same vocabulary of coercion on schools, clinics and cricket academies: the missionary as foreign agent. In Auckland, Adventists unveiled AKAI, a faith-bounded AI, shifting digital mission from entering shared spaces to owning the machine.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 3–10 July 2026

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This week’s briefing surfaces a striking cross-tradition convergence: the migration of missionary outreach into engineered “third spaces.” Christian evangelism in VRChat reached national attention (NPR), while Yad L’Achim exposed a Christian café network in Israel using the very same “third-space” logic — both drawing the identical charge of infiltrating a “neutral” space. India supplies the hard-law counterpoint, as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India asks that “proselytization” be struck from the proposed amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.