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 – 22-29 May 2026
This week’s briefing tracks two converging dynamics. In India, the “ghar wapsi” reconversion campaign pushed eastward into Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, where a single conversion can be narrated at once as a crime (when toward Islam) and a celebrated homecoming (when toward Hinduism) — while Nepal’s Christians petitioned to repeal anti-proselytism law. Meanwhile, a debate among China’s persecuted house churches over whether Western advocacy protects or endangers them, and Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, which calls the digital world “a new continent to be evangelised.”