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 – 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.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends- 31 July – 7 August 2026
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 – 29 May – 5 June 2026
This week’s briefing finds the same story playing out in three countries: a religious majority casting the missionary as the intruder. In India’s Uttarakhand, arrests over alleged Christian conversion of the Tharu tribe escalate into an SIT probe and a “foreign funding” charge; in Nepal, a conversion accusation on Parliament’s floor draws Christian protest; in Indonesia’s Bantul, an Islamist group halts a permitted church service.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 8-18 May 2026
China’s southward expansion and legal recharacterisation. – The American accountability gap. – Anti-missionary law as administrative routine. – Toward a papal ethics of digital-age mission. – The South–South missionary frontier.