An investigation into the phenomena and practices of spiritual ...

According to Gottwald (1989) liberation theology sets about its task of hermeneuticalinterpretation with Marxism, on the one hand and the Bible on the other. Liberationtheologians Boff and Boff (1987) suggest it was at the same time that there was aninspiration of nationalistic consciousness and significant industrial development in theshape of import substitution to the benefit of the middle classes and the disadvantage andmarginalization of huge sections of those living in poverty; so making a direct admissionof the importance of social and historical context in the re-codification of religion.This connection of theological development to the socio-economic context can also betraced in the detailed accounts of the experiences of West Indians when they first arrived inBritain in the mid 1950s and 1960s presented by Calley (1965), the earliest researcher intothe Pentecostal movement in Britain and Hiro (1991). They both suggest that this era ofmigration is an international continuation of processes of rural-urban migration begun withthe industrial revolution.Calley‟s (1965) exposition of the life of the church people is one of „aliens‟ people whosedifficulties were caused by the very fact of migration to an unfamiliar environment, with adifferent way of worship a different way of relating to each other and a different way ofrelating to the wider society that openly rejected them on arrival in Britain, despite the factthat they had come by invitation. Calley calls them „West Indian Sects‟ an indication thatthey were separate and regarded themselves as separate from the host community. Onemay speculate that this exclusionary attitude was caused not merely by the rejection theymet in white churches, but also by developed from fear of being infiltrated and taken overby the white churches. They were compelled to have their rules for survival as they did inslavery days. They became closed and private was wary of disclosing information about117