Proselytism.info

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 12–25 September 2026

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No. 27 – Generated by Claude AI

Covering the period: 12–25 September 2026, with flagged catch-up items from late August and early September 2026.

Table of Contents

  1. News: Debates, Reactions, and Conflicts over Missionary Activities
  2. Missionary Agency Reports and Data
  3. Documents on the Ethics of Missionary Work
  4. Academic Events and Publications
  5. Analysis
  6. Note on verification and scope

1. News: Debates, Reactions, and Conflicts over Missionary Activities

Kazakhstan — a Muslim missionary movement on trial, on the evidence of a hidden camera (Taldykorgan, report of 24 September 2026)

Nine Muslim men are on criminal trial at Taldykorgan City Court (Zhetisu Region) under Criminal Code Article 405, Part 2, which covers participation in an organisation banned for “extremism.” They are accused of membership of the Tablighi Jamaat, the South Asian-origin Muslim missionary movement, which an Astana court banned in Kazakhstan in February 2013. It is the second mass Tablighi trial in less than a year: on 22 December 2025, a court in Konayev (Almaty Region) jailed twelve men for one to five years. The Taldykorgan trial began in June under Judge Alibek Abdikhayev. Its next hearing was set for 25 September 2026, and no outcome was known when this issue went to press. The defendants face up to two years’ imprisonment.

The evidence is what makes the case important for this briefing. The prosecution rests on covert audio-video recordings made in the Taldykorgan home of Zhakipbek Ormanov (49). The recordings were authorised as National Security Committee “special measures” and ran from 8 July 2025 until late 2025. The NSC investigator, Lt-Col. Nurbol Zhananov, commissioned “expert analyses” of the recorded talk. The second of these concluded on 20 February 2026 that “in the given conversations, propaganda was carried out of the religious ideology of the Tabligh Jamaat organisation.” According to Forum 18, that conclusion rested on the use of terms for religious meetings and faith-sharing that are common in the movement. One of the experts, Roza Akbarova, has previously provided analyses that helped jail Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Muslims. The defence lawyer, Agisbek Tulegenov, stated the objection at a press conference in Almaty on 21 September: “The coincidence of several words uttered by the defendants in a private conversation, and not publicly in a sermon or anywhere else, in no way constitutes a crime.” A search of Ormanov’s home on 27 November 2025 found a single copy of a book by a member of the Kandhlawi family, one of seven Tablighi-related titles banned by Kazakh courts between 2016 and 2020.

The state’s own voice is revealing. The Deputy Director of the regional Research Centre for Religious Issues and Rehabilitation, asked whom the defendants had harmed, told Forum 18: “They didn’t kill anyone. They didn’t call for anyone to be killed.” She added: “We can’t say if the movement is dangerous or not.” On 20 September, the day before the defence press conference, regional television broadcast a 28-minute programme calling the Tablighi Jamaat “destructive,” with the Research Centre’s director taking part. Forum 18 notes from state procurement records that the Centre regularly pays media and podcasters to promote its views, often in contracts worth 2 million tenge. Forum 18 also recalls a 2024 case in which a seized Kandhlawi Selected Hadiths was ordered destroyed and, in the words of the responsible official, “It was burnt.” [Source: Forum 18, English, 24 September 2026, Felix Corley]

Why it matters. The Tablighi Jamaat is one of this briefing’s standing Muslim missionary beats. The development turns out to be a prosecution rather than a campaign. More striking, the offence here is constituted neither by a convert nor by a witness, the “someone saw” pattern this briefing has been tracking. It is constituted by a recording, and the missionary content is inferred by an expert from vocabulary in a private conversation. This is taken up in the Analysis.

Uzbekistan — a Shia lament on a Telegram channel as “a threat to public security” (Samarkand, report of 22 September 2026)

Sunnatillo Akparov (22), a Shia Muslim, has been on trial at Samarkand District Court since 25 August 2026 under Criminal Code Article 244-1, Part 3, Point 4: production or distribution of “materials containing a threat to public security and public order” over telecommunications networks, by a group. He faces five to eight years. The material consists of marthiyas, Shia musical laments for Imam Husayn and the martyrs of Karbala, which he posted on a Shia Telegram channel he ran. The government’s Religious Affairs Committee produced its “expert analysis” within a day of the police request. It found that the content “encouraged the activity and teachings of various [unspecified] ideological movements.” According to a source familiar with the case, Judge Aziz Lazizov pressed Akparov to admit that two songs on his phone were “Wahhabi” extremist material, and he told Forum 18 that Akparov “listened to extremist songs. The punishment for this is imprisonment.” The trial was due to resume on 25 September. Police also raided the Samarkand homes of the parents of two Shia Muslims who had fled the country, and confiscated a Qur’an that had been published and officially stamped in Uzbekistan. [Source: Forum 18, English, 22 September 2026, Mushfig Bayram]

The case matters on two counts. It is intra-Islamic: a Sunni-majority state is treating the circulation of Shia devotional content as dangerous propagation, and the judge’s conflation of Shia laments with “Wahhabi” material shows how shapeless the category has become. And it is the clearest instance yet of a prosecution that targets the channel rather than the object, a development the standing leads have been watching for (see Analysis).

Pakistan — the Federal Constitutional Court confirms the ban on the Ahmadiyya founder’s collected writings (Islamabad, 8 September 2026)

On Tuesday 8 September 2026, a two-judge bench of Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court, headed by Justice Aamer Farooq with Justice Syed Arshad Hussain Shah, dismissed the petitions of Muhammad Abdul Qadoos and others against the Punjab government’s ban on Rohani Khazain (Rūḥānī Khazāʾin). This is the 23-volume collected writings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya movement. The ban dates from a Punjab Home Department notification of 25 June 2014, issued under Section 99-A of the Code of Criminal Procedure and Section 19 of the Press, Newspapers, News Agencies and Books Registration Ordinance 2002, which ordered all copies forfeited. The 13-page judgment, written by Justice Farooq, holds that Article 20 of the Constitution guarantees religious freedom only “subject to law, public policy and morality.” It describes the petitioners’ reliance on the religious-freedom clause as “an afterthought” and “nothing more than wittering on about the subject of Fundamental Rights in general.” The court declined to examine the ban’s merits because the petitioners had not placed the banned material before it through the proper remedies. The Lahore High Court and its Multan bench had earlier dismissed the petitions on grounds of delay and failure to use an alternative remedy. According to Dawn, the judgment notes that the ban originated in a decision of the Ulema Board, merely conveyed by the chief secretary’s office. [Source: Dawn, English, 9 September 2026, Nasir Iqbal]

The Geneva-based NGO CAP Freedom of Conscience placed the ruling within a fortnight of escalation. Mirza Safdar Mahmood (65), a community official, was shot dead near Kot Ahmad Shah (Mandi Bahauddin district) on 2 September while on his way to an Ahmadi place of worship. Banners reading “We hate Qadianiyat” and calling for a social boycott appeared along University Road in Sargodha in early September. On 19 September, Malik Mahmood Mubarak (70) and his son Ayaz (40) were shot and wounded in Sargodha. UN human-rights experts had expressed concern on 7 September. CAP’s summary of the ruling’s effect: members of the community “cannot print, publish or circulate one of their central religious texts.” [Source: CAP Freedom of Conscience, English, 22 September 2026]

Provenance and relevance. Dawn is Pakistan’s leading English-language daily and reports the judgment directly. CAP is an advocacy NGO, and its account of the shootings rests on police reports and local media. The item belongs on this beat because the Ahmadiyya isone of the most organised missionary movements in contemporary Islam, and because the text in question is that movement’s foundational literature. It adds a Muslim-majority, intra-Islamic case to the Russian and Central Asian book seizures already on file.

Russia — follow-up: the undesirable-organisations regime reaches a church foyer in the Far East, and fire safety becomes a ground for banning a missionary (September 2026)

Follow-up to the Forum 18 survey reported in the issue of 12 September (Krasnogorsk destruction order; Mission Eurasia; Sibiryova). The SOVA Centre’s September record adds four data points.

  • Amur Region. On 9 September, Skovorodino District Court fined Igor Molchanov, presbyter of the Evangelical Christian-Baptist church in the settlement of Taldan, 20,000 roubles under Administrative Code Article 20.33. A prosecutor’s inspection had found 32 books in the church foyer published by Mission Eurasia and Child Evangelism Fellowship, both on the “undesirable” register. The latter’s designation (July 2026) was reported here on 29 August. This is the first CEF-imprint prosecution this briefing has seen. [Source: SOVA Centre, Russian, “В Амурской области пресвитер-баптист оштрафован за книги нежелательных организаций” / “In Amur Region a Baptist presbyter fined for books of undesirable organisations,” 22 September 2026]
  • Krasnodar Territory. On 10 September, Abinsk District Court granted a civil suit by the district prosecutor and banned Andrey Aksenyuk, leader of a congregation of the International Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (MSC ECB), from carrying out missionary activity “until violations are eliminated.” The violations cited are of the legislation on freedom of conscience, on anti-terrorism security in places of mass gathering, and on fire safety (case no. 2-1358/2026). [Source: SOVA Centre, Russian, “В Абинске суд запретил баптисту заниматься миссионерской деятельностью «до устранения нарушений»” / “In Abinsk court bans Baptist from missionary activity ‘until violations are eliminated’,” 24 September 2026]
  • Altai Republic. On 26 August, a magistrate in Gorno-Altaisk fined MSC ECB member Andrey Pushkinov 5,000 roubles under Art. 5.26 §4 KoAP (“illegal missionary activity”) for handing out copies of the Christian newspaper Веришь ли ты? (“Do you believe?”) to passers-by during a city festival on 18 July. Police detained him once the copies ran out. The case was made public in September. [Source: SOVA Centre, Russian, 24 September 2026]
  • Register. On 23 September, it became known that the UK-based Friends of Falun Gong Europe had been added to the undesirable-organisations list. Falun Gong itself was designated in 2020. [Source: SOVA Centre, Russian, 25 September 2026]

The Abinsk decision deserves emphasis. A missionary ban obtained by civil suit, conditioned on fire-safety and anti-terror compliance at the premises, is a new entry for the list of substitutable instruments this briefing keeps. It needs no evidence about what was said to whom, only an inspection of the building.

India — the fortnight in the Hindi press: literature, phones, “consent letters” and an organised-crime charge (12–25 September 2026)

Hindi-language regional dailies carried a steady run of arrests under state anti-conversion statutes. Three items illustrate the direction of enforcement:

Catch-up (not previously reported): Mumbai’s churches and the anti-superstition law. An Article 14 investigation published on 13 August 2026 documents at least 14 incidents between 29 March and 9 August in which Bajrang Dal activists interrupted, intimidated or attacked small independent congregations in Mumbai and Vasai. The activists often traced services through Instagram, arrived with police, and turned the confrontations into reels. Four FIRs were filed against pastors and congregants, none under a conversion statute. All were filed under Maharashtra’s 2013 Anti-Superstition and Black Magic Act, for healing prayers, while three FIRs were filed against Bajrang Dal members. In the July monsoon session, the Minister of State for Home (Rural), Pankaj Bhoyar, told the assembly that a police inquiry had found no evidence of forced conversion. [Source: Article 14, English, 13 August 2026] Date flag: Article 14 gives the Maharashtra Act’s commencement as 30 July 2026. This briefing settled on 28 August 2026, from the Home Department notification of 17 August, which Fides confirmed independently. The 30 July figure is a fourth reporting variant, probably conflated with presidential assent (31 July), and is recorded here without relitigating.

Kerala: ghar wapsi in a state without an anti-conversion law (reported 15 and 21 September). Organiser, the RSS weekly, reported two “homecoming” programmes in Kerala facilitated by Hindu Seva Kendram and the Adivasi Samrakshana Samithi: one of 512 people (15 September) and one of 102 former Christians (21 September). According to the search-engine extracts, the organisers stressed that participants acted “without force, inducement or compulsion.” Verification caveat: both article pages are behind a bot-check and could not be retrieved. The figures and wording rest on the URLs’ dates and search-engine extracts only, and on a movement weekly. [Sources: Organiser, 15 September; Organiser, 21 September, English]

The Agra FIR adds a new instrument to the list: the organised-crime provision of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which casts the prayer network as a criminal syndicate. With the anti-superstition route in Mumbai, and BNS s. 299 in Palghar (reported 29 August), the picture from Maharashtra and UP is that the anti-conversion statute is one tool among several, and not always the one used.

Israel — Yad L’Achim’s High Holiday campaign, and a counter-missionary organisation that publishes outreach literature (17–23 September 2026)

In the Days of Awe (yamim noraim), Yad L’Achim launched its annual “Kofer Nefesh” (“ransom of the soul”) fundraising appeal, backed by a public call from the Beit Din Tzedek of the Edah Haredit, the Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox court. The call is signed by Rabbis Moshe Sternbuch, Avraham Yitzchak Ulman, Yehoshua Rosenberger, Yehuda Fisher, Shlomo Yehuda Hirsch, Shimon Yitzchak Schlesinger, Shmuel Brandsdorfer and Aharon Brandsdorfer. It describes the organisation’s activists as people who “risk their lives daily to save wayward Jews from the hands of the missionaries,” credits them with having “returned thousands of souls under the wings of the Divine Presence,” and declares it “a great mitzvah to come to their aid as far as possible.” [Source: “מרנן ורבנן שרי התורה הביד”צ דפעיה”ק שליט”א בקריאה קדושה למען יד לאחים” / “The rabbis of the Beit Din Tzedek of Jerusalem in a holy call on behalf of Yad L’Achim”, Yad L’Achim, Hebrew, 17 September 2026]

The same day, the organisation published the other half of its mandate. It stated that “hundreds of Jewish children are growing up in Arab villages” inside Israel, often cut off from Jewish tradition, and framed the case around two milestones of the traditional Jewish life course: age five, when Scripture study begins, and age thirteen, bar mitzvah. A companion piece was headed “Five years old for the Qur’an? Thirteen for the mosque?”, a pointed inversion of the Mishnaic “at five, Scripture; at thirteen, the commandments.” Yad L’Achim calls this work, again, “a quiet campaign that is not fought at the state’s border, but is also about identity, belonging and the Jewish home.” [Source: “ארגון יד לאחים מתריע: מאות ילדים יהודים גדלים בכפרים ערביים” / “Yad L’Achim warns: hundreds of Jewish children growing up in Arab villages”, Yad L’Achim, Hebrew, 17 September 2026]

Then, on 23 September, Yad L’Achim announced that it had re-edited and reissued its decades-old Sukkot explanatory booklet, which covers the laws of the booth, the four species, the intermediate days and Simchat Torah, for distribution to “thousands of mekoravim,” people being drawn towards observance. It has been translated into Russian and Arabic “for the various audiences among whom Yad L’Achim activists operate” and is being distributed through all its branches. Rabbi Shmuel Lifshitz: “This booklet is like old wine that only improves.” [Source: “יד לאחים הוציא לאור מחדש את חוברת הקירוב המכוננת לחג הסוכות” / “Yad L’Achim reissues its foundational outreach booklet for Sukkot”, Yad L’Achim, Hebrew, 23 September 2026]

A counter-missionary body that prints a kiruv (outreach) booklet in Arabic is a fact worth pausing on. The Arabic edition is evidently meant for Jewish women and children being brought back from Arab villages, and possibly for Arabic-speaking family members. The Russian edition serves the post-Soviet immigrant population, which Yad L’Achim has long regarded as the main target of Christian and messianic missions. Here defending against outreach and conducting it are the same act, carried out by the same organisation with the same literature. Provenance: all three items are the organisation’s own publications, and the figures (“thousands,” “hundreds”) are its claims.

Or LeAchim located. The website of Or LeAchim (אור לאחים, “Light to the Brothers”), the Bnei Brak-based body distinct from Yad L’Achim that exposed the Café Basimta ownership in July, is orlehachim.com. It states that it was founded in 2017 in response to “a new development in missionary activity,” and it maintains a list of “cults” and a case-reporting line. Its anti-missionary department is headed by Binyamin Volkan. The site has no dated news index. Its activity is reported mainly through the haredi and national-religious press: Hakol Hayehudi keeps an Or LeAchim tag page (latest item 11 May 2026, the cancellation of a missionary conference in a Be’er Sheva municipal property), and Hidabroot keeps another.

Sri Lanka — follow-up: the LankaWeb series turns to Joseph Vaz, “Apostle of Sri Lanka” (7 and 9 September 2026)

Follow-up to the LankaWeb anti-missionary historiographical series, last reported on 4 September. Two further pieces by the Buddhist activist and lawyer Senaka Weeraratna move from colonial history to commemoration. The first (7 September) calls it “hypocrisy” to celebrate St Joseph Vaz, canonised in 2015, for his resistance to Dutch persecution of Catholics while keeping “a deafening silence” about Portuguese repression of Buddhism and Hinduism. It asks the Vatican and the local Church to follow the repudiation of the “Doctrine of Discovery” with an apology to Buddhists and Hindus, “followed by compensation.” The second (9 September) calls the naming of a Goan missionary as “Apostle of Sri Lanka” “an act of cultural and religious insensitivity” and “a crude ploy to sanitize the dark legacy of European colonialism,” since Goa was “the nerve centre of the Portuguese empire in Asia.” [Sources: LankaWeb, 7 September 2026; LankaWeb, 9 September 2026, English]

Nigeria — Catholic bishops name “neo-paganism” as a national challenge and oppose a foreign-funding bill (18 September 2026)

The communiqué of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria‘s Second Plenary Assembly, sent to Fides, names “neo-paganism” as “a challenge for the nation.” The bishops describe it as “a growing trend where believers and especially youths return to idol worship, due largely to economic hardships, cultural revival, and shallow Christian formation.” Since it “spreads rapidly through internet culture, media engagement, and books,” they direct pastoral agents to “intentionally incorporate the use of digital spaces, social media, and online catechesis.” The same communiqué asks the National Assembly not to pass the bill regulating foreign funding of private entities. The bishops warn that provisions requiring registration of foreign aid, and allowing refusal “if an organization’s work is deemed ‘not in the national interest’,” give officials “broad, undue discretionary powers” that could “adversely affect churches, mosques, schools, and humanitarian groups.” [Source: Agenzia Fides, English, 18 September 2026]

Two observations. First, a return to ancestral religion, which Hindu organisations in Kerala stage as ghar wapsi, “homecoming,” is named here by a Christian episcopate as a regression, and the response in both cases is organised outreach. Second, Nigeria now joins India and Sri Lanka on this briefing’s list of states where foreign funding is becoming the regulatory frame. In the Nigerian case the bill is drafted neutrally and the churches oppose it alongside mosques.

Earlier: on 4 September, Archbishop Lucius Ugorji of Owerri denounced Imo State directives that, among other things, compel Christian mission schools to observe Islamic holidays (Fides, 7 September).

2. Missionary Agency Reports and Data

Muslim World League — Islamic sources for AI companies, a translation-correction unit, and an encyclopedia of “scientific miracles” (Mecca and New York, 7–24 September 2026)

On Thursday 24 September, during the UN General Assembly’s high-level week, the Muslim World League hosted “AI for All: Faith, Human Dignity and Artificial Intelligence” in New York. Present were Secretary-General Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, UN Alliance of Civilizations High Representative Miguel Moratinos, OIC Secretary-General Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, and representatives of US AI companies. The conference recommended that the Alliance of Civilizations draft an “Alliance of Civilizations Code of Ethics for AI” (see Section 3). Al-Issa announced three MWL initiatives that belong squarely in this section:

  1. an AI laboratory, run with technology companies, to build programs for religious, educational and humanitarian institutions;
  2. the digitisation of Islamic and Arabic sources and books, to be made “available to AI companies, while respecting intellectual property rights”;
  3. a dedicated unit to monitor and correct translation errors in Islamic texts and scholarship, errors that, he said, had led to “concepts and interpretations that did not reflect the truth” and “mistaken perceptions and beliefs.”

[Source: Arab News, English, 24 September 2026]

Catch-up, 7 September. At the MWL’s Mecca headquarters, Al-Issa opened the International Forum on Scientific Miracles in the Qur’an and Sunna (الملتقى الدولي للإعجاز العلمي في القرآن والسُّنّة). He launched the MWL Encyclopedia of Scientific Miracles (موسوعة رابطة العالم الإسلامي للإعجاز العلمي في القرآن والسُّنة), presented as “the first interactive digital scientific encyclopedia in its field” and available in ten languages: 500 peer-reviewed studies, 7,500 pages in 15 volumes, 2,000 images, 2,000 short videos and 4,000 links. [Source: “العيسى يُطلِقُ موسوعة رابطة العالم الإسلامي للإعجاز العلمي في القرآن والسُّنّة” / “Al-Issa launches the MWL Encyclopedia of Scientific Miracles in the Qur’an and Sunna”, Okaz, Arabic, 7 September 2026] According to regional press, Al-Issa also made his first visit to Somalia in mid-September and met senior scholars in Mogadishu. This rests on search-engine extracts only and is not written up.

Why these belong together. Iʿjāz ʿilmī, the claim that the Qur’an anticipates modern scientific findings, has for half a century been one of the main apologetic instruments of transnational da’wa. A ten-language digital edition backed by the MWL is outreach material in the plainest sense. The New York announcements move the same effort a layer down, from the reader to the machine that answers the reader. The concern is less with persuading any given audience than with making sure that what AI systems say about Islam rests on sources and translations the League regards as authoritative. This is the first case this briefing has recorded of a major missionary body treating AI training data as a field of outreach (see Analysis).

Seventh-day Adventist Church — OneVoice27 follow-up: Telegram in Serpukhov, a phone consecration in Durban (reports of 15–24 September 2026)

Follow-up to the Global Launch Day report of 12 September. The Adventist News Network’s topic index carried some fifteen division and union reports in the window. Three stand out.

  • Euro-Asia Division (Russia, Belarus). In Serpukhov (Moscow Region), Central Conference president Pavel Pavelko urged “each church member” to use “their personal digital media to spread hope.” The congregation already runs a website, a Telegram channel, a Rutube channel and a VK group that takes prayer requests. In Siberia, from Tyumen and Omsk to the Transbaikal and the Yamalo-Nenets okrug, members held identical booklets inscribed “OneVoice27: Mission for All” and filled in a questionnaire asking, “What do I have and what can I share with others?” The Second Brest congregation (Belarus) held a dedicated service. [Sources: ANN, “Euro-Asia Division launches OneVoice27”, 24 September 2026; ANN, “Eastern Russia joins OneVoice27”, 18 September 2026, both translated from the ESD’s Russian-language site]
  • South Africa. At the Durban launch (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 September), congregants were invited to hold up their mobile phones for a consecration service, committing “to use their devices intentionally to encourage others, share hope, tell stories of faith, and invite people.” Division communication director Pako Mokgwane argued that “digital missionaries must communicate honestly,” while recognising that “effective digital evangelism requires listening and adapting … rather than reproducing the same message everywhere.” GC associate communication director Samuel Gil: “The platforms are the means; Jesus is the end.” [Source: ANN, 17 September 2026]
  • Angola. A literature evangelist, Vicente Mendes da Silva, takes part in digital evangelism “with a button phone,” which is the programme’s own answer to the objection that digital mission excludes the poor. [Source: ANN, 21 September 2026]

The Russian reports are the most significant for this briefing and the most carefully worded. They say nothing about law. Yet since 2016, “missionary activity” in Russia has been legal only for registered bodies and authorised persons under documented conditions, and SOVA records fines under Art. 5.26 §4 against Baptists this same month (Section 1). A strategy whose premise is that every member evangelises through personal channels runs straight into a legal regime whose premise is that only authorised persons may. The ANN reports give no sign that the tension is being discussed in public.

Southern Baptist IMB — the trustees’ figures, a security operations centre, and healthcare as mission strategy (14–17 September 2026)

Trustee meeting, 16–17 September (Rockville, Virginia). The trustees approved 48 fully supported missionaries, three of them with the Canadian National Baptist Convention, and a balanced 2026–27 budget of $318,510,000. President Paul Chitwood reported that missionary applications have risen 500% since 2018; that close to 400 “global missionary partners” (non-American missionaries working on IMB teams) “shared the gospel with more than 200,000 people last year”; that the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering has exceeded $200 million for five years running; and that the volunteer pipeline sends 15,000 people a year. On risk, he described a completed multimillion-dollar device-provisioning programme giving every team member worldwide secure communications, and a 24/7 Global Security Operations Center “from which trained team members can view real-time threats all over the world.” Parents who visit it, he said, respond with “more hugs and more handshakes and more tears.” [Source: IMB, English, 17 September 2026]

MedAdvance Paraguay, 3–5 September (reported 14 September). The IMB held its first international MedAdvance conference, which in 19 years had previously met only in the United States. It was hosted by the Centro Médico Bautista in Asunción, with 121 participants from 15 countries plus guests from India and Indonesia, and was preceded by a consortium of six Baptist hospitals descended from IMB mission hospitals. The programme combined plenaries on “the core missionary task” with breakout sessions on “engaging Muslims, Hindus and atheists,” urban settlements, digital engagement, and “ministry in cultures influenced by folk Catholicism.” It closed with training in the SALINE Process, described as “an approach to integrating healthcare ministry with gospel engagement.” One hundred Spanish copies of former IMB missionary Charles Fielding‘s Preach and Heal were distributed, and 42 commitment cards were collected. IMB health-strategies coach Leah Brown (Peru): “Latin Americans identify themselves as wanting to go.” [Source: IMB, English, 14 September 2026]

Three things are worth registering. First, the healthcare-as-strategy language is explicit and unembarrassed: in the agency’s own words the aim is “global healthcare strategies to reach the lost.” This is exactly the link between service and conversion that Indian anti-conversion statutes classify as “allurement,” and that Indian Christian bodies, as reported on 11 September, deny intending. Second, an agency session on ministry in “cultures influenced by folk Catholicism” is a rare, documented case of evangelical mission defining Catholic Latin America as a mission field. That is intra-Christian missionary competition stated in the missionaries’ own programme. Third, the “security operations centre” is a reminder of how far the large sending agency has come to resemble a risk-management institution, a point raised in earlier issues and now given a concrete form.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — past 90,000, with women now a third of the force (18 September 2026)

Follow-up to the 88,500 record reported on 1 August. The Church announced on 18 September that its full-time missionary force now exceeds 90,000, against a pre-2026 record of about 88,000 (2014). The growth is attributed to the largest cohort of young women ever serving, more than 30,000, after the First Presidency’s November 2025 decision to let women begin missions at 18. The Church opened 55 new missions on 1 July, bringing the total past 500. President Dallin H. Oaks: “Missionary work is soaring to new heights. We are currently being reinforced by the first wave of 18-year-old sisters.” [Source: Church News, English, 18 September 2026]

Catholic Church — “We are the sheaves”: the missionary past celebrated in Malawi, and a correction on the paradigm’s age (19 September 2026)

Follow-up to “The Church of the Sheaves,” reported on 12 September. On 19 September, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, as special delegate of the Holy See, presided at St Mary’s Parish, Nzama (Diocese of Dedza) over the national celebration of 125 years of permanent Catholic presence in Malawi (1901) and ordained two priests. He paid tribute to the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) and the Montfort Missionaries, and applied the paradigm directly: “Most of them left without knowing if they would ever go back home. Their leaving was like a dying. And many of them did die… Today we are celebrating the fruits of their sacrifice. We are today the sheaves of what they planted.” [Source: Agenzia Fides, English]

Correction of emphasis. The issue of 11 September presented the “Church of the Sheaves” as a framework being developed and newly presented to bishops. It is older than that: The Pillar published an interview with Nwachukwu under the title “‘The Church of the sheaves’ — preparing priests for the re-evangelization of the West” on 25 August 2025 (Pillar, paywalled; headline and date verified). Its original practical concern was forming African and Asian clergy for service in Western dioceses. The October 2026 conference at the Urbaniana still has no published date or programme.

Also in the Catholic rotation: at the autumn meeting of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Poland (Warsaw, week of 14 September; reported 22 September), Bishop Jan Piotrowski said that “we cannot simply remain tied to the forms of the past.” The meeting stressed that churches in mission territories “are not simply recipients of aid, but collaborators,” ahead of the centenary of World Mission Day on 18 October 2026 (Fides).

Indonesia — follow-up: MUI brings the Middle East alumni network into da’i standardisation (Jakarta, 15 September 2026)

Follow-up to the Wahdah Islamiyah / MUI mass certification reported on 12 September. On 15 September, MUI received the central board of JATTI (Jalinan Alumni Timur Tengah Indonesia, the network of Indonesian graduates of Middle Eastern universities) to discuss cooperation in dakwah, cadre formation, zakat and waqf, and the dai standardisation programme. MUI’s head of dakwah, KH Abdul Manan Ghani, asked that JATTI preachers be “tough in facing the challenges of an increasingly complex age,” and that they be “grounded” and present “especially in the 3T regions” (tertinggal, terdepan, terluar: underdeveloped, frontier and outermost areas). He described standardisation as covering Islamic learning, wawasan kebangsaan (national outlook), communication and digital media. [Source: “MUI Sambut Baik Kunjungan DPP JATTI, Perkuat Sinergi Dakwah dan Pemberdayaan Umat” / “MUI welcomes JATTI visit, strengthening synergy in dakwah and community empowerment”, INAnews, Indonesian, 17 September 2026]

The licensure thread (see 12 September) is spreading from one mass organisation to the transnational alumni networks that carry Middle Eastern religious training back into Indonesia. The frontier emphasis matters too: “3T” regions are also where Christian missions and Muslim dakwah meet most directly, in Papua, Maluku, NTT and the interior of Kalimantan.

3. Documents on the Ethics of Missionary Work

No new institutional code of conduct on mission was located in the fortnight. Five items of normative substance are reported, each with its status stated.

Status: a conference recommendation, not an adopted document. The MWL’s “AI for All” meeting (Section 2) recommended that the UN Alliance of Civilizations develop an “Alliance of Civilizations Code of Ethics for AI.” It would be drafted by a committee of religious leaders, educational, intellectual and legislative experts and technology-company representatives, with the aim of a common international framework. The event specifically examined “AI-generated content that supports or encourages hatred, violence and civilizational conflict driven by ideological, religious or related intellectual motives.” Moratinos said the Alliance “was ready to undertake the initiative.” [Source: Arab News, 24 September 2026]

It belongs here because the body proposing an interreligious ethics of AI content is also, as Section 2 shows, the body moving to supply AI companies with its own sources. The comparative point, taken up in the Analysis, is that the missionary organisation is asking to help write the rules for a medium in which it intends to be heard.

The Nigerian bishops on foreign funding and “national interest” (18 September 2026)

Status: episcopal communiqué, reported by Fides; full text not located. Beyond the objection to the bill itself (Section 1), the communiqué makes a normative claim: that discretion to refuse registration on grounds of “national interest” is incompatible with “the fundamental rights of association and freedom of religion, thought and conscience.” The bishops make this claim on behalf of churches, mosques, schools and humanitarian groups together. [Source: Fides]

A court’s articulation of the boundary: “subject to law, public policy and morality” (Pakistan, 8 September 2026)

Status: judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court. The Rohani Khazain judgment (Section 1) sets out a view of the constitutional right “to profess, practise and propagate religion” in which propagation of a minority’s founding texts can be defeated by executive forfeiture on an Ulema Board’s recommendation, with no judicial review of the content. The court described the religious-freedom claim as “an afterthought.” For the comparative study of how courts draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate propagation, this is a clear statement of the restrictive pole: the judgment does not balance propagation against harm, because it declines to examine the harm. [Source: Dawn, 9 September 2026]

An agency method statement: honesty and adaptation in digital mission (Durban, reported 17 September 2026)

Status: remarks by a denominational communication director at a launch event. Pako Mokgwane’s formulation for OneVoice27 (Section 2), “digital missionaries must communicate honestly” while adapting language to audience, is a small but explicit statement of the norm that the Christian digital-mission debate has circled since the VRChat controversy: disclosure of identity combined with contextual adaptation of message. It is the practitioner’s version of the “concealed origin” criterion reported from the Gil and Sung article on 11 September.

An Indonesian study of how Islamic media construct the ethics of the preacher (published 28 August 2026)

Status: peer-reviewed article; detailed in Section 4. Fatima and Hakim’s framing analysis of the Gus Miftah controversy shows two Islamic news outlets constructing etika dakwah on two levels: interpersonal (clarification, reconciliation, self-correction) and public-institutional (moral propriety, accountability, consequences for a preacher who also holds public office). It fits the pattern identified in earlier issues: Indonesian discussion of dakwah ethics centres on the conduct of the preacher, not on the consent of the audience.

4. Academic Events and Publications

Method: Crossref REST API, queried through the browser (web_fetch returned empty bodies), using query.title with from-pub-date:2026-06-20 and until-pub-date:2026-09-25. Terms: proselytism, proselytizing, proselitismo, prosélytisme, Proselytismus, anti-conversion, religious conversion, missionary, evangelism, dakwah, da’wah, ghar wapsi, apostasy, Tablighi, misyoner, миссионер. Journal endpoints were also queried for Social Sciences and Missions (ISSN 1874-8945), Mission Studies (1573-3831), International Review of Mission (1758-6631), Missiology (0091-8296), Journal of Contemporary Religion (1353-7903) and Religions (2077-1444). Each item below was grepped against the archive by author surname, DOI fragment, journal and title keywords before listing. Verification basis: every item rests on its individual Crossref record. Where the record carries an abstract, the summary follows the abstract. Where it does not, no summary beyond the title is offered. No article page was retrieved in full this fortnight.

New journal articles

Ulung Titah Suharta, Elfi Mu’awanah and Muhammad Faishol Al Hamimy Hamim, “Psychosocial and Spiritual Experiences of Young People in Café-Based Dakwah at Ngopi Senja, Trenggalek,” International Journal of Islamic Thought and Humanities 5, no. 2 (2026): 298–326. Published 18 September 2026. DOI 10.54298/ijith.v5i2.1161. CC BY-SA. A phenomenological study (five informants, eight observed sessions; the lead researcher is an insider on the organising committee) of dakwah held in an East Javanese café. Peer belonging and social support are the dominant experiences, but the authors stress that the café’s openness was “conditional on café consumption, social and religious affinity, and the continuing authority of the speaker”; disagreement was “possible but uncommon.” Relevance: this is the Muslim counterpart of the evangelical “third space” café, which in Jerusalem produced the Café Basimta controversy (reported 12 July and 12 September). The method is the same; the reception is the opposite (see Analysis).

Annisa Fitri Amaliah, “Unequal Ethical Worlds: The Everyday Management of Piety among Tablighi Women,” Al-A’raf: Jurnal Pemikiran Islam dan Filsafat 23, no. 1 (2026): 21–44. Published 30 June 2026, nearly three months ago and not previously reported. DOI 10.22515/ajpif.v23i1.15279. CC BY-NC. An ethnography of women in the Tablighi Jamaat in Bandung, based on participant observation in masturah gatherings (the women’s version of the movement’s outreach tours). It describes how women move between the movement’s “intensive ethical spaces” and the more plural moral ground of everyday life, and proposes “liminal agency” as the key concept. Relevance: a rare study of the movement’s female missionary practice, and a useful counterweight to the Kazakh prosecution in Section 1, where the same movement appears only as “extremist ideology” identified from vocabulary.

Ozan Karabulak (Marmara University), “Ötekiyle Karşılaşmak: Rusya Türklerinin 1910 Kazan Misyoner Kongresi’ne Tepkileri ve İhtida Bağlamında Bir Hicab Tartışması” / “Encountering the Other: The Reactions of the Turks of Russia to the 1910 Kazan Missionary Congress and a Debate on the Hijab in the Context of Conversion,” Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi, no. 55 (2026): 49–83. Published 30 June 2026, nearly three months ago and not previously reported. DOI 10.24058/tkidergi.1797664. According to the Turkish abstract, the 1910 Kazan Missionary Congress of the Russian Orthodox Church revived Muslim intellectual life in Russia. Two readings appeared in the Muslim press: that the missionaries were no longer powerful and the congress unimportant, and that it was a religious and cultural threat. The renewed debate then turned, in periodicals circulating between Kazan, St Petersburg, Bakhchisaray, Baku, Orenburg and Istanbul, to veiling and women’s freedom. The article examines the dilemmas of reformist intellectuals and ulama “faced with a critical issue such as the spread of Islam.” Relevance: a classic case of a counter-missionary reaction reshaping an internal debate, told from the side of the resisting community.

Aigerim Aliaskar (L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University), “Consciousness Under Dual Pressure: Colonial Diglossia, Orthodox Missionary Activity, and Islamic Cultural Resilience in Late Imperial Kazakhstan,” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 46, no. 8 (2026). Published 31 August 2026. DOI 10.55221/2693-2229.2879. On the Russian Empire’s Orthodox missionary and Russifying education policy in the Kazakh steppe (the Ilminsky system). The author argues that Arabic-script instruction in traditional qadim schools built a “resilient cognitive framework” that preserved Islamic identity against Orthodox mission, and that the Alash intelligentsia turned the resulting “colonial diglossia” into a bilingual Islamic-national identity. Relevance: read alongside the Taldykorgan trial, it shows the deep history against which a Kazakh state now polices Muslim missionary vocabulary.

Philemon Kipruto Tanui, “Fear and the Missionary Mandate: A Missiological Analysis of Barriers to Christian Witness Among Somali Muslims in Eastleigh, Nairobi,” Journal of Philosophy and Religion 5, no. 1 (2026): 56–69. Published 17 September 2026. DOI 10.51317/jpr.v5i1.1188. CC BY-NC-SA. Interviews with twelve leaders and members of three Africa Inland Church congregations in Nairobi. The study finds that fear works as a “systemic barrier at individual, communal, and institutional levels,” opening a gap between the church’s theology of mission and its actual witness to Somali Muslim neighbours. Relevance: a missionary’s-eye account of self-restraint, which the anti-conversion literature, focused on excess, rarely records. The journal’s publisher is a small open-access house, and the item is reported for its subject rather than its standing.

Sri Dewi Wulandari, “Strategi dalam Manajemen Dakwah Pemberdayaan K.H. Zainuddin Amir pada Mualaf Baduy Luar” / “Strategy in the Management of Empowerment Dakwah by K.H. Zainuddin Amir among Converts of the Outer Baduy,” Tanzhim: Jurnal Dakwah Terprogram 4, no. 2 (2026): 381–398. Published 31 August 2026. DOI 10.55372/tanzhim.v4i2.85. CC BY-NC-ND. A library-based study of dakwah pemberdayaan (“empowerment dakwah“) among converts to Islam from the Outer Baduy, an indigenous Sundanese community with strong ancestral custom. It describes the programme as combining religious instruction with economic empowerment, drawing on Muhammadiyah networks and government support. Relevance: the pairing of material help with religious instruction among an indigenous people is exactly what, in the Christian case, Indian and Indonesian critics call inducement. Here it is described approvingly, as method.

Rania Fatima and Lukman Hakim, “Konstruksi Etika Dakwah dalam Pemberitaan Media Islam: Analisis Framing Kontroversi Ucapan Goblok Gus Miftah” / “The Construction of Dakwah Ethics in Islamic Media Reporting: A Framing Analysis of the Gus Miftah ‘Goblok’ Controversy,” Jurnal Komunikasi Islam 16, no. 1 (2026): 72–110. Published 28 August 2026. DOI 10.15642/jki.2026.16.1.72-110. CC BY-SA. Summarised in Section 3.

Jean Claude Havyarimana, “The Thousand-Year Church: Trustee Missiology from Africa to the Universal Church,” Missiology: An International Review, online first, 20 August 2026. DOI 10.1177/00918296261467051. Proposes “trustee missiology,” which recasts Catholic mission around transmission across generations rather than expansion or inculturation. It draws on African Catholicism, which passed “from mission territory to mature local church within living memory,” and on the disappearance of North African Christianity as the counter-case. Relevance: it is the academic twin of the Dicastery’s “Church of the Sheaves,” the daughter church theorising its own inheritance, and appeared three weeks before Nwachukwu’s Malawi homily.

Jee Hae Lee (Fuller Theological Seminary), “Women in the Lausanne Movement: An Analysis of Gender Discourse within the Lausanne Documents, 1974–2024,” Missiology: An International Review, online first, 1 August 2026. DOI 10.1177/00918296261473222. Traces gender discourse through the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Manila Manifesto (1989), the Cape Town Commitment (2010–11) and the Seoul Statement (2024). It finds a movement that “consistently prioritized institutional unity over gender justice,” and a “troubling reversal” in 2024, where gender figures as a contested area “against perceived external threats.” Relevance: a close reading of the Lausanne Movement’s own texts, relevant to the missionaries’-self-understanding mandate. Lausanne was otherwise quiet this fortnight.

Korean-language items (Crossref records only; no abstracts registered, so no summary is offered):

  • 김완 (Kim Wan) et al., “아시아 민족주의 발흥과 복음전도의 과제: 세계기독교 글로컬리티 관점에서” / “The Rise of Asian Nationalism and the Task of Evangelism: A Glocal Perspective from World Christianity,” Theology of Mission (Korea Society of Mission Studies) 83 (2026): 82–120. Published 31 August 2026. DOI 10.14493/ksoms.2026.3.82. Title directly on point for the anti-conversion beat.
  • 심형규 (Hyunggyu Shim), 조기룡 (Kiryong Cho) et al., “불교와 개신교의 전도선언 비교연구” / “A Comparative Study on the Missionary Proclamation of Buddhism and Protestantism,” Journal of Seon Studies 74 (2026): 277–304. Published 31 August 2026. DOI 10.22253/jss.2026.8.74.277. The “missionary proclamation” of Buddhism is presumably the Buddha’s commission to the first sixty monks (Vinaya, Mahāvagga I), set beside the Great Commission. That is inference from the title only.
  • Seon Kyeong Kim, Sung-Jin Chung et al., “1000명선교사운동 출신 한국 선교사들의 현황과 경험 분석 및 추후 과제” / “Current Status and Experiences of Korean Missionaries Who Participated in the 1000 Missionary Movement and Future Challenges,” Theological Research Institute of Sahmyook University 28, no. 2 (2026): 120–157. Published 31 August 2026. DOI 10.56035/tod.2026.28.2.120. This one does carry an abstract: a survey of 1,222 Korean alumni of the Adventist 1000 Missionary Movement (questionnaire n=150; eight interviews), finding high continued church participation and leadership, but only 26 cohorts still keeping active group channels. Relevance: rare quantitative data on what becomes of short-term lay missionaries, from an Adventist university.

Turkish-language item: Dilşen İnce Erdoğan and Hacer Koç Yapar, “Amerika’dan Van’a Yolculuk: Missionary Herald Dergisi Verilerine Göre Van’da Misyonerlik Faaliyetleri (1872–1891)” / “A Journey from America to Van: Missionary Activities in Van According to the Missionary Herald (1872–1891),” Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 28, no. 3 (2026): 1569–1593. Published 15 September 2026. DOI 10.16953/deusosbil.1868083. According to the abstract, it reconstructs the ABCFM Van station from missionaries’ letters and reports, with emphasis on the 1877–78 war, famine relief and schooling. It concludes that mission was “not limited to religious preaching” but transformed traditional structures through education, health and institutions. Relevance: an instance of Turkish historiography of Protestant mission to Armenians.

New books (verified through reviews in the Journal of Contemporary Religion)

Hans A. Harmakaputra, Christian–Muslim Relations in Post-Reformation Indonesia: Resistance, Identity and Belonging. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026. x + 206 pp. ISBN 978-1-3995-2395-0 (hb); 978-1-3995-2397-4 (PDF); 978-1-3995-2398-1 (epub). Located through Hugh Goddard‘s review (Alwaleed Centre, Edinburgh), JCR, published online 24 August 2026, DOI 10.1080/13537903.2026.2703380. “Post-Reformation” here means post-Reformasi (after 1998).

Sujey Vega, Mormon Barrio: Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. New York: New York University Press, 2026. 257 pp. ISBN 9781479833832 (hb); 9781479833849 (pb). Located through David-James Gonzales‘s review (Brigham Young University), JCR, published online 11 September 2026, DOI 10.1080/13537903.2026.2716971. Reported for its bearing on how converts are received into the fastest-growing missionary force in the Section 2 data.

Conferences and diary

  • IAMS Europe 2027: “Revival, Renewal and Conversion”? Mission, Memory, and Christian Witness in Contemporary Europe. Paris, 24–27 June 2027, organised by IAMS Europe with the Association Francophone Œcuménique de Missiologie (AFOM). Paper proposals are open through the conference site. iamsparis2027.eu
  • World Buddhist Sangha Council 60th Anniversary, Sri Lanka, 27 November – 2 December 2026. wbsc2026.com
  • Bradeen v. Bickford: US Supreme Court cert petition deadline approximately 30 November 2026; Liberty Counsel has announced a petition.
  • Taldykorgan Tablighi trial: hearing set for 25 September 2026. Samarkand (Akparov): hearing set for 25 September 2026. Outcomes to be followed.

5. Analysis

1. The book, the channel and the conversation: three layers of enforcement in a single fortnight

On 12 September this briefing argued that object-seizing enforcement, aimed at books, was losing ground just as outreach stopped depending on objects, and that the states to watch were those moving from objects to speech. It closed with a question: which state would be the first to regulate the link layer, and prosecute over a channel rather than a book? This fortnight gives a partial and uncomfortable answer. That state was never going to be a new one. The Central Asian extremism regimes already do it, and they have added a third layer beneath it.

Set the fortnight’s cases side by side.

The book. Pakistan’s constitutional court confirms the forfeiture of every copy of the Ahmadiyya founder’s 23 volumes. An Amur court fines a Baptist presbyter for 32 books in his foyer bearing the imprints of Mission Eurasia and Child Evangelism Fellowship. Kazakhstan’s record includes the destruction of a Kandhlawi hadith collection (“It was burnt”). Madhya Pradesh police list “religious literature, booklets, pamphlets” first among the items seized in Betul. The book is still the easiest thing for a state to count, and the Pakistani case shows that the approach is not confined to post-Soviet space or to Christians. Its most complete form this fortnight is intra-Islamic.

The channel. Sunnatillo Akparov faces five to eight years not for possessing anything, but for running a Telegram channel that carried Shia laments. The Uzbek offence is defined by the medium (“with use of the mass media or telecommunication networks”), and the aggravating factor is that the channel had members. Kazakhstan’s 2024 sentences against two of the Taldykorgan defendants already included three-year bans on “religious activity with use of the internet.” Betul police seized the accused men’s phones alongside the pamphlets. The link layer is already regulated, just not under the name of proselytism.

The conversation. Taldykorgan adds something new. The state’s evidence of missionary activity is a set of covert recordings of talk in a private home, analysed by an expert who finds “propaganda” in the use of the movement’s words for meeting and faith-sharing. There is no book (except one old volume found later), no channel and no convert. The “someone saw” pattern this briefing has followed since August — Moscow, Palghar, Maine — required at least a witness who was offended. Here the witness is a microphone, and the offence is found by lexical analysis.

Now set against these the fortnight’s evidence from the missionaries. In Serpukhov, in the same Moscow Region whose Krasnogorsk court ordered Bibles destroyed, the Adventist congregation runs Telegram, Rutube and VK channels, and its conference president asks every member to evangelise through personal media. In Durban, congregants hold up their phones to be consecrated. In New York, the Muslim World League announces that it will digitise Islamic sources for AI companies. Outreach is moving down through the same layers as enforcement, from book to channel to the individual device, and in the MWL’s case to the training corpus that sits beneath every channel.

The analytical conclusion is sharper than on 12 September. The move from paper to link was not an escape. It moved the contest to a layer that the most restrictive states had already mapped, using extremism law rather than religion law. Where enforcement has reached the private conversation, as in Kazakhstan, the medium hardly matters: the target is what is said among believers, and any channel will do. The more open question concerns the fourth layer the MWL has now named, what machines say about a religion. No state regulates that as proselytism, and no ethics code touches it. The same organisation that proposes supplying the corpus has also proposed, in the same meeting, that the UN draft the ethics code for the medium (Section 3).

2. Homecoming or regression: the same act, named twice

Two reports from the fortnight describe the same religious movement in opposite language. In Kerala, Hindu organisations stage ghar wapsi, “homecoming,” for 512 and then 102 people, mostly former Christians and Adivasis, returning to what the organisers call their “ancestral roots.” In Abuja, the Catholic bishops of Nigeria warn that young believers are “returning to idol worship” through “cultural revival,” call it neo-paganism, and commission digital catechesis against it. Both describe a return to the religion of the ancestors. One side calls it restoration, the other decline. Each side answers it with outreach, and each accuses the other side’s agents of working through inducement.

The symmetry reaches into vocabulary. The Kerala organisers, according to the only available extract, insist that participants acted “without force, inducement or compulsion.” That is the statutory formula of the Indian anti-conversion laws, the same formula under which Christian pastors are prosecuted, now used as a certificate of legitimacy by the counter-conversion movement. A reconversion movement is using the conversion statute’s own test to vouch for itself.

Commemoration shows the same fault line. On 19 September in Nzama, an African archbishop celebrates 125 years of Catholic Malawi with “We are today the sheaves of what they planted”: the missionary is an ancestor. Ten days earlier, on LankaWeb, a Sri Lankan Buddhist lawyer calls the canonised missionary Joseph Vaz’s title of “Apostle of Sri Lanka” a “crude ploy to sanitize” colonial devastation and asks the Vatican for an apology “followed by compensation”: the missionary is an invader. The Section 4 literature follows the same line. The Kazakh study reads Ilminsky’s Orthodox mission as an assault that Islamic schooling survived. The Turkish study reads the 1910 Kazan congress as a provocation that revived Muslim intellectual life. The Missiology article on “trustee missiology” reads African Catholicism as the proven inheritor of the missionary deposit.

The generalisation this suggests is simple to state and awkward for both sides: where a mission produced a majority, or a self-confident church, the missionary becomes an ancestor; where it produced a minority amid a majority that defines itself against it, the missionary remains a foreigner. The judgment on the missionary past follows the demographic outcome, not the missionaries’ conduct. That is why a Vatican dicastery and a Sri Lankan Buddhist activist can look at the same Portuguese-Goan missionary tradition and reach opposite verdicts, each sincerely. It also explains why Nwachukwu’s “a past to honour, not to erase,” reported on 12 September, is aimed at Western Christians rather than at Buddhists: only inside a successful daughter church is the missionary legacy something one can defend against its original senders.

3. The same method, opposite receptions: the café and the clinic

Two pairs of items show how a single outreach method is judged by who uses it and where.

The café. In Trenggalek, East Java, young Muslims attend dakwah in a café called Ngopi Senja. The academic study describes the openness as “conditional on café consumption, social and religious affinity, and the continuing authority of the speaker,” and treats it as a normal and legitimate form of religious formation. In Jerusalem, a café run by Jews for Jesus as a “third space” became, over the summer, the object of haredi demonstrations, a counter-missionary exposé and a football club’s withdrawal of sponsorship (reported 12 July and 12 September). The method is the same: informal hospitality, conversation, a guiding speaker, openness bounded by affinity. In Java it is study material for a dakwah faculty; in Nahlaot it is “missionary-messianic influence … winning over hearts through food and drink.” The difference lies entirely in the majority-minority relation. Outreach by the majority to its own drifting members counts as formation. Outreach by a minority to the majority counts as intrusion.

The clinic. The IMB’s MedAdvance speaks openly of “global healthcare strategies to reach the lost” and trains doctors in a method “integrating healthcare ministry with gospel engagement.” The Indonesian study of empowerment dakwah among Outer Baduy converts describes economic support combined with instruction as sound method. Muhammadiyah’s hospitals and the Baptist hospitals of Paraguay are institutional cousins. Yet in India the same pairing of service and message is defined in law as “allurement.” The Agra FIR goes a step further and treats healing meetings as organised crime, while Mumbai police use the anti-superstition law. Indian Christian bodies, as reported on 12 September, answer by denying that their charity has any evangelistic purpose. The mission agencies’ own publications make that denial hard to sustain for evangelicals. The Muslim dakwah literature shows that the pairing is not a Christian peculiarity. It is common to missionary religions, and it is illegal only where the missionary is a minority.

4. Counter-missionary organisations as missionary organisations

A thread first seen in Yad L’Achim’s “third space” exposé in July became explicit this fortnight. In the same week, the organisation asked the Edah Haredit’s rabbinical court to endorse its fight against missionaries, described its work with Jewish children in Arab villages as “a quiet campaign … about identity, belonging and the Jewish home,” and reissued an outreach booklet in Russian and Arabic for “thousands of mekoravim.” Defending the Jewish soul from missions and bringing it to observance are not two programmes but one, carried out by the same activists with the same literature among the same populations.

The comparative parallels suggest a structural rule rather than a peculiarity. Kerala’s ghar wapsi organisers run reconversion as outreach with a ritual, now fitted out with the statutory language of consent. Nigeria’s bishops answer “neo-paganism” with online catechesis. MUI’s standardisation programme is sold as protecting the umma against ghazwul fikri, “intellectual invasion,” while training da’i for frontier regions. In each case, organised resistance to outreach turns, within a generation, into organised outreach of its own, because the only lasting defence against a rival’s proselytism is a counter-proselytism. For the historian this is a caution against the common framing of these conflicts as missionaries versus resisters. More often, as this fortnight shows, the conflict is between two outreach enterprises, one of which has the state, the majority or the rabbinical court on its side.

All sources cited are hyperlinked to their original locations. Corrections and additions welcome.

This text was generated by Claude (Anthropic), Claude Opus 5.5 Medium, on 25 September 2026. It has been published after editing. https://claude.ai.

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