Proselytism.info

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 24–30 October 2026

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Can preaching alone, with no convert in sight, cost a believer his right to stay? India’s Madras High Court says yes: a US citizen of Indian origin lost his OCI status for preaching in villages without permission. The same week, India’s Supreme Court took up a challenge to Chhattisgarh’s 2026 anti-conversion Act, Russia fined four people for “missionary activity” at a Muslim prayer site in Yekaterinburg, and a Kuwaiti da’wa committee reported 1,407 converts in three months, most of them reached online abroad. From Rome’s “Church of the Sheaves” to Orthodox missionaries trained against neopaganism, this briefing traces a shift: the offence is moving from conversion to unlicensed speech.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 3-9 October 2026

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France’s Catholic bishops become partners of the state’s anti-cult agency. A Chhattisgarh village invokes tribal self-government law to bar pastors. The Madras High Court rules that conversion by inducement, and ghar wapsi alike, disqualifies a body from foreign funding. Russian courts heard 716 “illegal missionary activity” cases in 2025, up 66%, while the Orthodox Church trains activists in “counter-sectarian mission”. In Israel, Yad L’Achim pushes door-to-door Witnesses out of Petah Tikva; in Iran, a pastor’s wife must serve 13 years for “deviant proselytising”. The common thread: majority institutions joining the regulation of outreach, and money replacing belief as its legal object.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 26 September – 2 October 2026

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In Chhattisgarh, more than a thousand non-Christians filed declarations stating that they attend church of their own free will. Hindu groups took the filings to the district authorities, and churches in Dhamtari now post notices warning non-Christians that they enter at their own risk. Documents meant to prove voluntariness have become evidence of exposure. This week’s briefing also covers a Rajasthan court’s first reading of the State’s 2025 conversion law, Russian fines and donation prosecutions, an Indonesian church opposed purely as a permit dispute, the Muslim World League courting Brussels, Wycliffe’s record translation year, and Southern Baptist and Adventist agencies drawing a line around what AI may do in mission.

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

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Two weeks of conflicts over proselytism, from Central Asia to Nigeria. In Kazakhstan, nine alleged Tablighi Jamaat members are tried on hidden-camera evidence; in Uzbekistan, a Shia faces prison for laments posted on Telegram; Pakistan’s top court upholds the ban on the Ahmadiyya founder’s writings. The Muslim World League plans to supply Islamic sources to AI companies, Yad L’Achim reissues an outreach booklet in Russian and Arabic, and Nigeria’s bishops warn of “neo-paganism”. Our analysis follows enforcement from the book to the channel to the private conversation, and asks why a return to ancestral religion is “homecoming” in one place and regression in another.

Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 18–21 August 2026

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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.