LYNC — Love Your Neighbor Community Eurasia Panel
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Engage · Research · Equip

Engage

Phase one of the cycle. Engage feeds Research.

Engage asks Who must work together?

In practice

What engage means at each level.

Nationally

A safe space where multi-faith, multi-sector actors examine the three issues through case studies from around the world.

Internationally

The standing table where member countries discuss the three issues from their own experience and best practice.

What it produces

A table that did not exist before. Engagement’s output is who is in the room: registered and unregistered religious communities, government officials, and civil society sitting together — in a setting where unregistered communities had every reason to avoid officials, and officials had been trained to treat them as a problem to be managed.

  1. November 2019

    The first ever international religious freedom roundtables in modern Kazakhstan’s history, held in Shymkent, Ust-Kamenogorsk, and Aktobe. Government officials, religious leaders, and civil society sat together — including communities that hold no registration and would not normally be in the room at all.

  2. March 2022

    The first Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy certificate training to bring law enforcement, religious communities, and international organizations together, in Shymkent — police and imams, prosecutors and pastors, in the same sessions.

That is the whole of it, and it is not a small thing. Everything that follows in Research and Equip depends on a room that had to be convened before it could be used.

How it connects

How engage draws on the pillars.

The Engage phase is where the Eurasia Panel’s three foundational pillars come together in practice. It begins with relational diplomacy(opens in a new tab), recognizing that lasting progress in religious freedom is built not only through institutions and policies, but through trusted relationships among government officials, religious leaders, academics, and civil society. By creating spaces for sustained dialogue, the Panel helps transform unfamiliar counterparts into trusted partners capable of addressing difficult issues together.

These relationships are guided by the principles of Covenantal Pluralism(opens in a new tab), which affirms both the freedom to hold deep religious or philosophical convictions and the responsibility to live peacefully alongside those who hold different beliefs. Rather than asking participants to minimize their differences, the Panel encourages engagement marked by mutual dignity, intellectual humility, and a shared commitment to the common good.

Sustaining that engagement takes more than goodwill. Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL)(opens in a new tab) supplies the competence for it: knowing one’s own tradition well, understanding a neighbor’s on its own terms rather than through inherited stereotype, and working alongside them on shared problems without either side pretending the differences away. In the Engage phase this is what turns a first meeting into a working relationship — officials, religious leaders, and civil society acquire the vocabulary and the habits to discuss difficult issues accurately, and the room becomes one that can convene itself again.

The cycle continues

Engage feeds Research.

National work brings evidence and experience to the Panel; the Panel returns approaches that countries test against their own conditions and build into their own curricula.

Back to the full cycle