This week’s briefing tracks a widening split in how states police religious outreach — and how outreach answers back. A Moscow Region court orders 178 New Testaments destroyed because of their publisher’s imprint; a Kyrgyz investigator says the offence was “Adventist books in their homes”; meanwhile an IMB team in South Asia distributes Scripture on QR cards costing a penny each, and an Adventist leader in Kisumu tells 4,000 people that “no one can deny you a pulpit because it’s on your hand.” Maharashtra shows the limit of that escape: its new Act has left a Catholic bishop unwilling to preach that Jesus is the one Saviour. Also: Jerusalem café affair, Indonesia’s first mass certification of preachers, and Rome’s new “Church of the Sheaves” paradigm.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 21–29 August 2026
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 – 3–10 July 2026
This week’s briefing surfaces a striking cross-tradition convergence: the migration of missionary outreach into engineered “third spaces.” Christian evangelism in VRChat reached national attention (NPR), while Yad L’Achim exposed a Christian café network in Israel using the very same “third-space” logic — both drawing the identical charge of infiltrating a “neutral” space. India supplies the hard-law counterpoint, as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India asks that “proselytization” be struck from the proposed amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.