Ecclesiastical Base Communities or Base Christian Communities, as they are also called, began as early as 1955, according to Boff (Leonardo Boff 1984: 9). Paolo Freire's religious education of the poor and oppressed joined with the Base Education Movement in the 1960s to address the core question of the meaning of Christianity and the role of individual Christians in a world so overwhelmingly populated by the poor and the oppressed. According to Leonardo Boff, it became clear that, ‘The only way to be a Christian was to be at the service of liberation’, otherwise, in the words of Boff, ‘…poverty meant forced impoverishment at the hands of economic and social mechanisms of exploitation’ (Leonardo Boff 1984: 10).

But there was also a pragmatic concern that priests were in short supply and the people wanted to worship and to study the Bible. Having not enough clergy – not enough religious trained sisters or brothers – the church by the very nature of the situation was forced to look upon the laity as viable resources for leadership. The early proponents of base communities saw these communities as working within the context of the established church, or as L. Boff said, in ‘permanent coexistence’ with the church. L. Boff wrote, as well, in Ecclesiogenesis, the hierarchy of the church, the pope, bishops and priests should, ‘…exercise their function within the communities and not over them, integrating duties instead of accumulating them, respecting the various charisms (gifts), and leading them to the oneness of one and the same body’ (Sigmund 1990: 83).