In early 1988, when I was teaching in the Religious Studies Department of the University of Zimbabwe, I was offered the opportunity to study developments in some independent churches in Liberia. In the following months I read all I could on Liberia, and I eventually arrived in mid-1988 to begin the task. Of the next sixteen months, I spent the greater part in Liberia. My original project, for various reasons, fell through after a few months, and gradually my research evolved into the wider study presented here. Much of the material I had gathered in the course of that original project is included here, in a reworked form, in the section on independent churches.

I came to Liberia with a particular perspective. For several years I had been interested in the phenomenon within Latin American Christianity which goes by the name of liberation theology. The term is used here in a general way to refer to theology that tries to relate Christianity to the social structures and systems in which Christians find themselves. I had lived in Southern Africa for some years and become interested in such theological developments there. The foundation document of this theology in South Africa is the Kairos Document, in which several South African theologians sought to distance themselves from a state theology which supported government policies, and from a church theology that merely turned in on itself, and to elaborate a prophetic theology which addressed the social evils in which they lived.