Emerging Church, circa 1970s

In recent months both Andrew Jones and Dan Kimball have noted books from the 1970s with "emerging" titles.

I'd like to add another title to the discussion: Sergio Torres and Virginia Fabella, editors, The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Underside of History (Orbis, 1978).

This is a collection of essays from the 1976 Ecumenical Dialogue of Third World Theologians held at Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Interestingly, the voices here present interrogate the hegemony of Western theological trends (see below); these words remain true today.

One hopes, as I did in a recent paper, that Emergent (US) voices continue to adopt global postures.

From the Final Statement of the Ecumenical Dialogue of Third World Theologians (1976):

"The theologies from Europe and North America are dominant today in our churches and represent one form of cultural domination. They must be understood to have arisen out of situations related to those countires, and therefore must not be uncritically adopted without our raising the question of their relavance in the context of our countries....We reject as irrelevant an academic type of theology that is divorced from action. We are prepared for a radical break in epistemology which makes commitment the first act of theology and engages critical reflection on praxis of the reality of the Third World" (from the Introduction, p. x).

Any thoughts?