"Nearest Help" at the Trainstation: A practical-theological Study on the "Bahnhofsmission".
Final Report Abstract
The railway mission is over 125 years old and is represented at over one hundred locations in Germany. Despite their Iogo, which is easily recognizable in the train station, and the distinctive uniforms of their employees, the majority of society has little knowledge of the wide range of assistance offered by railway missions. Their portfolio ranges from travel assistance, travel support, accommodation, social counseling, referrals to social aid institutions, emergency food and clothing, to crisis intervention and religious services. Every year, around 2 million guests take advantage of their services. About 2,400 employees ensure that help is provided in them nearly 5 million times a year. The DFG project researched for the first time in a scientific perspective how railrway missionary assistance takes place in concrete terms, which practices are associated with it in detail and in which respect this practice can be understood as church at the station (this is the self-designation of Bahnhofsmission Deutschland e.V.). Through ethnographic studies at several locations, it was possible to obtain internal views that focused on the actual practice of the employees. By means of interviews with employees and responsible persons as well as document and artifact analyses, these results led to a comprehensive presentation of Doing Bahnhofsmission in the present. The central guiding question of the research was what the employees do concretely during their time in the railway mission. ln addition to practices of space production and religion, the focus is especially on practices of helping. Even such an everyday practice as helping by no means proves to be self-evident, but in the context of the railway mission it represents a practice rich in preconditions, which has to respond to the specific spatial conditions at the station as well as to the special composition and sensitivities of its guests and its church sponsorship. ln the research project, the practices of the railway mission were analytically magnified, slowed down, and thus made comprehensible in their course by means of ethnographic description. On this basis, Doing Bahnhofsmission also takes on particular contours in its self-understanding as a church. Although church services, prayer and pastoral care are not constitutive for the practice of the railway mission, they nevertheless express an essential aspect of their self-understanding: they see themselves as institutions of the church, which quite explicitly addresses the weak and disadvantaged and at the same time reaches a special public at the station.
Publications
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Bahnhofsmission als Forschungsgegenstand. Diakoniewissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 297-307.
Moos, Thorsten
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Bahnhofsmission in Deutschland. Im Kontext der Epochen der Wohlfahrtspflege. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 248-257.
Nikles, Bruno W.
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Die Bahnhofsmission als Ander-Ort. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 258-266.
Roser, Traugott
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Die Bahnhofsmission als kirchlicher Ort im Bahnhof. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 276-285.
Eurich, Johannes
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Die Bahnhofsmission als Seismograph gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 267-275.
Sauter-Ackermann, Gisela
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Die Bahnhofsmission – Ort gelebter Ökumene. Theologische Reflexionen. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 286-296.
Sattler, Dorothea
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Doing Bahnhofsmission. Methodische Überlegungen zur empirischen Erforschung einer diakonischen Praxis. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 308-317.
Siegl, Christine
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Zu diesem Heft. Evangelische Theologie, 81(4), 244-247.
Karle, Isolde
