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 – 10–16 October 2026
Who pays the price of conversion – the missionary or the convert? This week, India’s Supreme Court ruled that a backward-class Hindu who becomes Muslim leaves his reservation status behind, while Iran keeps the Bible from converts but not from born Christians. In Russia, Muslims praying at home are fined for “illegal missionary activity”, and in Jharkhand a tribal body warns churches against celebrating local festivals – adopting a culture counts as an offence. Meanwhile, mission is growing: Africa now has more Catholics than Europe, Southern Baptists raised a record $212.5 million, and Adventists voted $99 million for one campaign. A global survey of conflicts over proselytism, drawing on sources in more than ten languages.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 18–21 August 2026
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.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 17–24 July 2026
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
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.