“Pray for Liberia.” I have been hearing that prayer request from Second (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC ruling elder Donald Cassell for about 30 years.

We have been seeing the Lord’s answers, big and small. A terrible civil war ended almost 20 years ago. The deadly Ebola outbreak also ended.

A team of servant missionaries are guiding Liberians through Hope for the Harvest, a ministry launched by Indiana farmers and sustained through a partnership with Liberian International Christian College (LICC). The goal is to boost family farming initiatives to become small businesses and provide a living family income. The larger vision is for Liberia to become a net exporter of agricultural products to other countries. The school teaches Farming God’s Way curriculum, using principles of the Bible and growing everything from eggplant to mangoes. One entrepreneurial initiative is a chocolate business, Redimere, providing job opportunities for Liberians and the sale of chocolate bars and cocoa from growing cocoa plants.

Rich Johnston, the retired pastor at Second RPC in Indianapolis, now leads short-term mission trips to the nation on the west coast of Africa, helping to add a work-study component to the academic training at a college in a rural part of the country. Rich is drawing on old skills for this new venture. Before he was a pastor, he taught industrial arts for 20 years, guiding high schoolers into on-the-job training opportunities in Indianapolis.

Donald Cassell also makes regular trips to the country, offering leadership training to student groups, including some from the college work-study program. Covenanters would appreciate how his curriculum includes William Symington’s kingdom doctrine, especially the qualification of Christ to be king and how we can pursue those qualities in leadership (Messiah the Prince, chap. 3).

Liberia has a special place in both African and American history. Liberia was the rare nation governed independently by Africans in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, while the rest of the continent was colonized by other nations. Between 1810 and the American Civil War, Liberia became a refuge for freed American slaves. It declared its freedom in 1847, in part because of threats to make it a British colony.

The history of Liberia is vigorously debated among Liberian and American scholars. One wing of this debate contends that the former slaves governed the nation very poorly from 1847 to 1980, leading to a military coup and 20 years of civil war. They contend that the settlers failed to integrate the indigenous tribes into the new nation.

Another wing contends that the settlers, or repatriates, set up a new nation with remarkably good results, especially in the context of their very challenging circumstances. The nation was governed under a Declaration of Independence and Constitution similar to the United States, but with a stronger emphasis on Christian faith. Instead of being a dependent colony, the country enjoyed representative government, political parties, and a peaceful transfer of power from one election to another for more than a century.

This second school of thought, more favorable to Liberia’s origins, has produced several new books recently. Liberty Brought Us Here by Susan Lindsey tells the nation’s story through original letters written by settlers back to their former owners in America, after they went back to Africa through the American Colonization Society (ACS). The society, started in 1816, emerged as a part of the abolition movement as an opportunity for freed slaves to return to Africa.

But the organization attracted people with various motives. Some members wanted to offer freedom for ex-slaves, who could be forced back into slavery if they remained in America. Some founders also saw the Liberian colony as a potential means of fighting the slave trade on the west coast of Africa. The trade had been outlawed by England and America, but the law was hard to enforce from a distance. When the British or American navy captured slave ships, Liberia became a haven for the freed captives. Then, others saw the colony as a missionary launching pad to reach Africa for Christ.

The ACS also attracted slavery supporters, who wanted to send freed slaves back to Africa for fear that their presence in America might encourage more slaves to look for liberty.

“The American Colonization Society blossomed into a curious collection of abolitionists, philanthropists, enslavers, and Americans of nearly every religious and political persuasion,” writes Ben Wright in another new book, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. “The ACS presented their ambitions as offering seemingly innumerable benefits, including the uplift and then elimination of American free Black communities, the erosion of slavery, the destruction of the illicit slave trade, the expansion of American commerce, and the conversion of Africa.”

The ACS was pursuing an idealistic mission and fell short in several of its aims. But its defenders note significant victories against the slave trade, along with a free African nation governed by former slaves.

Several years after the launch of the Liberian settlement, in the 1830s, the American abolition movement split between those who favored immediate emancipation and those who favored gradual emancipation.

Some immediate emancipationists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, turned vehemently against the ACS and any effort for freed slaves to return to Africa. Some former slaves thought their prospects for freedom were better in Africa. Those who wanted immediate emancipation could not see that slavery was going to last another 30 years.

This split between these two groups is at the heart of some of the controversy in Liberian history. Liberian historian C. Abayomi Cassell, a cousin of Donald’s grandfather, thought of it as a tragic misunderstanding. “Each society could have accomplished its purpose without damaging the other,” he wrote in his 1970 history of the country, Liberia: A History of the First African Republic. “Slavery had to be totally abolished; and the idea of returning the sons of Africa to their original habitat, if systematically carried out, and if the settlers were carefully steered through the first shock of living in a strange land, was a noble concept.”

C. Patrick Burrowes offers a similar view of Liberia’s original aspirations in two recent books, Black Christian Republicanism, The Writings of Hilary Teage (1805-1853): Founder of Liberia, and From Virginia Slave to African Statesman: Hilary Teage. Teage, freed from Virginia slavery with his family, went back to Africa at age 15 and became a founding father of the nation. He was a farmer, journalist, pastor, entrepreneur, and statesman, writing the new nation’s Declaration of Independence in 1847. He was editor of the newspaper, Liberia Herald, and secretary of state for the new nation. The declaration has some overlap with the American document, but with a more explicit Christian profession of faith, as well as a protest against their enslavement in the United States. “From us, feeble as we are, the light of Christianity has gone forth,” the declaration reads. “We were made a separate and distinct class, and against us every avenue of improvement was effectively closed.”

Burrowes was a journalism major at Howard University and received his PhD in communications from Temple University. He sets Teage and others in a context of pursuing the freedom they missed in America. Lott Cary, a pastor-missionary who went back with Teage’s family, put it this way when explaining his desire to leave America: “I am an African, and, in this country, however meritorious my conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits not by my complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my suffering race.”

Gradually the new nation annexed tribal portions of Africa but also wound up at war with African tribes or warlords who engaged in the slave trade. In that time, Africans were having their own debate over slavery, with some wanting abolition and others participating in the slave trade. Many of the abolitionists became part of the new nation of Liberia.

As Liberia developed, some have contended that the repatriates did not do well enough in assimilating the indigenous tribes. Others note the intermarriage and adoption of tribal children into settler families so that the distinction among the groups became blurred over time. Many Liberians have mixed backgrounds.

Fast-forward to 1980. Influenced by a mix of Marxism and utopianism, some young Liberians grew discontented with this heritage and the elected government in the 1970s. A military official named Samuel Doe led a revolt against the elected officials and assassinated the president in the executive mansion. A few days later, 13 cabinet members were shot on a beach in Monrovia, the capital. Doe’s government was overthrown a few years later, and the country was engulfed in a vicious civil war, with warlords contending for power in the 1990s. Those who could flee the country often did, sending much of the leadership and educated class to other countries. A history of that period reads like the tragedies of the French Revolution.

Donald Cassell came to America soon after the military coup, to learn architecture in Boston, Mass., then theology at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pa. He always saw that the need of Liberia was as much theological as economic. He knew the country needed a return to its Christian roots of the original Declaration and Constitution, but with a new theological depth, similar to the 17th Century Covenanters, or the 19th Century Dutch example of Abraham Kuyper and his Anti-Revolutionary Party.

Donald prays for a multigenerational reformation of his country and welcomes those who would offer their time, talent, and treasure for this noble aspiration, to help a nation, born in protest of American slavery, find her true liberty in Christ. “Twenty-five years of civil disturbances have left the economy and the country in shambles,” Donald laments. “The country remained stable until 1980. The military coup disrupted a long and delicate process of Liberia’s coalescence into a nation-state.”

From another perspective, Yoezer Cassell, 17, son of Donald and Choi-ha, has visited Liberia with his father. “The struggles of Liberians are no different than your struggles,” Yoezer notes. “I see a Liberian child being loved and cared for from the tender hug of a mother who is soon to be deceased. The child must now struggle and fight to find a purpose and future in life. Will anyone pray for the spiritual growth and development of this child?”

Yoezer identifies with some of the young Liberians he met there. “Every prayer for Liberia is appreciated because they see them answered in the form of brothers and sisters in Christ, outside of their country, helping train the young and teach them.”

Donald continues to ask for prayer for his nation as he works on the Africa project through the Indy-based Sagamore Institute. As Rome was not built in a day, he would say that Liberia needs several generations of spiritual awakening and reformation to fulfill the idealistic vision of the nation’s founders. That is why we should continue to pray for the nation of Liberia, similar to how others have prayed for other countries—John Knox for Scotland; John Calvin for France; and Adoniram Judson for Burma. We do not know precisely how God will answer all those prayers, but we know He wants us to pray.