Basel Mission

The Basel Mission is a Christian missionary society that operates around the world. Members of the society come from many different Protestant denominations.

The mission was founded as the German Missionary Society in 1815. The mission later changed its name to the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, and finally the Basel Mission. The society built a school to train Dutch and British missionaries in 1816. Since this time, the mission has worked in Russia and the Gold Coast in 1828, India in 1834, China in 1847, Cameroon in 1886, Borneo in 1921, Nigeria in 1951, and Latin America and the Sudan in 1972 and 1973. Since World War II, the mission has operated abroad via local church congregations. As of November 2002, the major countries or regions of operation were Bolivia, Cameroon, Chile, China (Hong Kong), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Peru, Singapore, Sudan, and Taiwan.

A major focus for the Basel Mission is to create employment opportunities for the people of the area where each mission is located. To this end the society teaches printing, tile manufacturing, and weaving, and employs people in these fields.

See also

• Protestant missionary societies in China during the 19th Century
• Theodore Hamberg

On 18 December 1828, the Basel Mission Society sent its first missionaries, Johannes Phillip Henke, Gottlieb Holzwarth, Carl Friedrich Salbach and Johannes Gottlieb Schmid, to take up work in the Danish protectorate at Christianborg, Gold Coast. On 21 March 1832, a second group of missionaries including Andreas Riis, Peter Peterson Jäger, and Christian Heinze, the first mission doctor, arrived on the Gold Coast only to discover that Henke had died four months earlier.

References

• Brick, Caroline (November 2002). "Basel Mission Records". Mundus: Gateway to missionary collections in the United Kingdom. Accessed 17 November 2006.

• Quartey, Seth. Missionary Practices on the Gold Coast, 1832-1895: Discourse, Gaze and Gender in the Basel Mission in Pre-Colonial West Africa. Cambria Press, Youngstown, New York, 2007.