Mission at Home

“How did I end up here?” was a question I often asked myself during the seven days of our excursion to Basel and southern Germany. What I imagined to be a “why not, certainly interesting” excursion soon became an intense undertaking that took a strain on my body: I fell into bed in the evening, exhausted and on the verge of tears. This was new to me and I would not have expected this from the Basel Mission (BM) project, whose aims and operations had not become very clear to me during the preparatory seminar. For the short time of the excursion, we had become “world shifters”. The different worlds, the different realities of life, however, could not be reduced to geographical borders. Some members of the Ghanaian Presbyterian Church definitely seemed more at home with the churches we visited in Germany and Switzerland and whose representatives we met than I, who had consistently kept the church at a distance since my confirmation eight years ago, while retaining an opportunistic fear of God. Although I was no stranger to religious spaces, it was all the more strange to realize how intact the legacy of the BM is today. So many times I wished to leave the room when I heard the umpteenth hymn of praise for the Basel missionaries by their descendants and the church representatives (German and Ghanaian), but I stayed and a field of research opened up that overwhelmed me in its sheer complexity.

On the first evening in the hotel lobby in Gerlingen, a colleague from the Presbyterian Church made a comment about our city tour “Mission and Colonialism” through Basel on the preceding day. He said that people in Europe in particular were far too critical of the BM. After all, it had achieved many important things. Among the most important things mentioned in the days that followed were various types of infrastructure and “expert knowledge”, including textbook medicine, systematization for the writing of indigenous languages and, above all, of course, the spread of the Gospel. It was also acknowledged that the Basel missionaries had ignored and destroyed local traditions and customs, or as an employee of the Mission 21 put it during the city tour: “The missionaries cultivated a Eurocentric interpretation of Christianity”. Now that these abuses of the past have been acknowledged and Christian religious practices have been adapted to local contexts, as my Ghanaian roommate explained to me, there is very little to criticize today.

This framing surprised me deeply. What about criticism of civilization, colonialism, different knowledge systems, criticism of religion, I asked myself. And what is this non-Eurocentric Christianity supposed to entail? Although there are many other possible interpretations of the activities of the BM, the church representatives from Switzerland, Germany and Ghana seemed to agree: The bottom line that overpowers everything is the spread of the Gospel. In the best case scenario, the Basel missionaries even laid the foundations for international cooperation. By contrast, non-church representatives from Ghana who were on the excursion with us were quite critical, especially younger students, and it goes without saying that the Basel-based students also disagreed among each other.

Our colleague’s formulation that people in Europe were far too critical of the BM is representative of the concern about an apparent secularization in Europe that was often expressed during the excursion – a concern that I personally do not share. So in the end, everything comes back to the question of how to evaluate not the activities of the Basel Mission per se, but Christianity and religion in general. So is someone who rejects religion altogether being too hard on the BM? Probably, because such an attitude would not do justice to the third of the Ghanaian population that is Christian, their personal faith must be taken seriously. Is the assessment of someone who does not problematize religion at all too soft? Again, yes. For example, it would conceal the inhumane acts that have been committed in the name of religion around the world.

Religion is often treated as a subject that you either believe in or not. What research on the BM needs, however, is an approach that first and foremost takes the concerns and goals of the BM seriously (without praising it). This then allows us to criticise the BM all the more soundly and precisely. For many devout Christians, the question of religion does not seem to arise; atheists may jump to conclusions. At the end of the excursion, the often-mentioned Presbyterian colleague, who was also my room-mate, said that it had been very special for him to share a bed with a European for the first time. The same was true for me about him being from the African continent, and it was also the first time for me to get so close to a pastor. For the short time of the excursion, we had become “world shifters”, who will remain so?

Portrait Yannick
About the author:Yannick

I’m studying history and gender studies at bachelor level. I am usually interested in social movements and Swiss history, but in a global perspective. I have no experience in African Studies. The excursion was definitely an eye-opener and a great way to make new friends with whom I will continue to keep in contact.