This volume sketches the roots of recent Latin American expressions of God's "option for the poor" and describes their relationship to the "base communities that have emerged in that context. This sets the framework for essays that examine the views on poverty and ecclesiology of the nineteenth-century founding figures of three conservative or evangelical North American Protestant denominational traditions.

These essays show that, in spite of profound differences in their historical settings and theological development, there are significant similarities in the views of the twentieth-century Latin American and nineteenth-century North American Christians. A common concern for the poor or for a more grass-roots, locally contextualized approach to church life resonates among these communities.

This is, in part, a book of historical theology. However, it is also an invitation to see ecumenical possibilities that God's Spirit may offer beyond the boundaries of familiar stereotypes of liberals, liberationists, Catholics, and conservative or evangelical Protestants.