Mission (station)

A Mission station is a location for missionary work. Historically, Christian missions would bring people into the 'fold', to teach 'natives' Western culture. Modern missionaries by contrast try to integrate themselves into local communities.

In some colonies, mission stations became a focus of settlement for displaced or formerly nomadic people. Missions were a useful tool in the colonial acquisition of land, the suppression of local culture, and the training of servants. Christian missionaries were complicit or co-opted in this role. Conditions on some mission stations have been likened to concentration camps, despite the stated good intentions of missionaries.

In modern missionary doctrines, mission stations are deprecated, because they were historically ineffective. Mission stations normally created disaffected individual converts, often seen as an outcast by their family and culture. In many cases, the only source of converts to a mission station were the orphans raised in the station's orphanage. Also, many misison station's converts were so alienated from surrounding cultures that they were unable to get work outside the mission station, let alone act as cultural ambassadors for christianity. In some cases, such "mission station christians" actively impeded Christian conversion in schools and orphanages in order to continue their own incomes. (See more information about modern missionary doctrines.)

In rural Australia, many missions have become remote localities or ghettoes on the edges of towns which are home to local Aborigines. The word may be seen as derogatory when used in a derogatory or racist way.de:Missionsstation