Introduction

The expansion of Christianity into lands beyond Europe was the main aim of the world missionary movements of the Catholic Church and Protestant churches in the colonial period. Those who observed the growth of mission-founded churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific rejoiced and compared them to the early rise of Christianity in ‘all nations’ (Matt. 28:19). Nevertheless, most missionaries and Western Church leaders expected that the ‘younger churches’ would continue to need the tutelage of the ‘older’ ones for decades, even centuries to come. That these churches would one day rival those in the West was foreseen by very few. At the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, the organiser John Mott, a US American, made a particular point of inviting leaders of ‘native churches’ and giving them a platform at the conference. There was not much enthusiasm among the missions for this idea, and as a result there were only 19 among a total of 1,215 delegates. In the event, their speeches were among the most memorable but, as Brian Stanley shows, even the few who had hoped that Asian Christians (Africans were almost completely disregarded) would contribute new theological insight failed to recognise it, or to receive it, when it was presented to them.

This chapter explores several ways in which theologians from the majority world introduced new approaches into Western theology in the second half of the twentieth century, namely liberation theology, inculturation and dialogue, even though these were not overtly recognised or explicitly received, or were even actively resisted, by Western theologians. It does this by focusing on how theologians and issues from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific impacted theological debates at three global gatherings in the 1970s: the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation in 1974, the Synod of Bishops on Evangelization in the same year, which was followed up in 1975 by Pope Paul VI's apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi and the World Council of Churches’ General Assembly in Nairobi, also in 1975. The chapter will look at key background to these debates in the effects of decolonisation and globalisation, tracing the influence of these non-Western initiatives on Western theology to the end of the century.