This book undertakes a redefinition of mission for our time and our situation in South Africa. The author does this by reviewing the missionary contribution of some black and white pioneers, as well as the missiological impact of important documents such as the Kairos Document. It opens attractive and challenging new avenues towards a vibrant new way of understanding massion. In the process the book evokes new enthusiasm for mission as a matter of life and death for the Christian church in South Africa.

In Mission Station Christianity, Ingie Hovland presents an anthropological history of the ideas and practices that evolved among Norwegian missionaries in nineteenth-century colonial Natal and Zululand (Southern Africa). She examines how their mission station spaces influenced their daily Christianity, and vice versa, drawing on the anthropology of Christianity. Words and objects, missionary bodies, problematic converts, and the utopian imagination are discussed, as well as how the Zulus made use of (and ignored) the stations. The majority of the Norwegian missionaries had become theological cheerleaders of British colonialism by the 1880s, and Ingie Hovland argues that this was made possible by the everyday patterns of Christianity they had set up and become familiar with on the mission stations since the 1850s.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

The essays in this volume study cultural conversions that arose from missionary activities in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries effected changes that often went beyond what they had intended, sometimes backfiring against the missions. These changes entailed wrenching political struggles to redefine families, communities, and lines of authority. This volume’s contributors examine the meanings of "conversion" for individuals and communities in light of loyalties and cultural traditions, and consider how conversion, as a process, was often ambiguous. The history of Christian missions emerges from these pages as an integral part of world history that has stretched beyond professing Christians to affect the lives of peoples who have consciously rejected or remained largely unaware of missionary appeals.