While working as a Research Officer at the School of Oriental and African Studies I resolved to write a history of modern African Christianity. It became part of the project I was engaged upon in association with Professor Richard Gray, the core of which was the running of a series of seminars to consider the evolution of the Christian Churches in independent Africa. Our seminars formed part of a wider international project of research which culminated in a Conference at Jos in Nigeria in September 1975. A large selection of the papers presented at Jos or written for the SO AS seminars has now been published by Rex Collings in a volume entitled Christianity in Independent Africa, edited by Edward Fasholé-Luke, Richard Gray, Godwin Tasie and myself. These papers have been of immense use for the writing of this history; indeed it would have been a nearly impossible task without them. At the same time the weight of concern in the SOAS and Jos discussions was much more thematic than chronological and my brief African Christianity (Geoffrey Chapman, 1976), written immediately after returning from the Jos Conference, was intended to draw together the findings of the whole project from this standpoint. Personally I was, however, convinced that the time had come for a fairly straight history of contemporary African Christianity and I set about planning it in 1974. The present volume is the result.

I must express my great gratitude to many people: first to SOAS which made me a Research Officer for three years with a wonderfully free rein, and to the Leverhulme Foundation which provided the grant to make this possible.