Ruth Padilla Deborst has been involved in leadership training, campus ministry, and community development with Christian Reformed World Missions. She is general secretary of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, on the board of International Justice Mission, and director of Ediciones Certeza Unida, the publishing house of Spanish speaking movements of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).

Angelyn Dries is Danforth Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University.  Her book, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History (Orbis, 1998), pioneered the field. She is completing a history of the Maryknoll Society. Dr. Dries is past president of ASM and has worked with Korean communities in Milwaukee and a Franciscan Sisters' congregation in Cameroon.

Ian T. Douglas is the bishop of the Connecticut diocese of The Episcopal Church. Formerly he worked at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City in overseas development and was a parish assistant in the Diocese of Haiti. Bishop Douglas earned a Ph. D. in missiology from Boston University and was the Angus Dun professor of World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA until his appointment as bishop. 

Daniel Jeyaraj is an Indian mission historian whose teaching and research deal primarily with the dynamics of Christian missions and their interaction with indigenous cultures in Southern India. He is a leading authority on the study of the Royal Danish-Halle Mission (i.e., Tranquebar Mission), Pietism, and the emergence of Protestant churches in eighteenth century India, and Christian interactions with the people of Indic religions. He is the Professor of World Christianity and Director of Andrew Walls Center for the Study of African Christianity at Liverpool Hope University. He is a visiting lecturer at Andover-Newton Theological School.

Todd M. Johnson is Research Fellow in the Study of Global Christianity and Director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is also Research Fellow at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. He is the co-editor, with Kenneth R. Ross, of the Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

Brian McLaren is an author and international speaker and activist for "emergent" Christianity. His work has been covered by Time (where he was noted one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals), Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and The Washington Post among others. His best known books include A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004) and Everything Must Change (Thomas Nelson, 2007).

Athanasios N. Papathanasiou has practiced law and holds a doctorate in theology.  He teaches at the Hellenic Open University, Athens, and is the editor-in-chief of the theological quarterly Synaxis. He is the author of Future, the Background of History: Essays on Church Mission in an Age of Globalization (Alexander Press, 2005).  

Peter C. Phan, a native of Vietnam, is the first non-Anglo to be elected President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He holds the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University and is on faculty at the East Asian Pastoral Institute, Manila and Liverpool Hope University, England. He has authored and edited numerous books, including the forthcoming Christianities in Asia (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Dana Robert is the Truman Collins professor of World Christianity and History of Mission at Boston University School of Theology and co-director of BU's Center for Global Christianity and Mission. A leading historian of mission, she was the opening keynote speaker at Edinburgh 2010. She is the author of Christian Mission: How Christianity became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

John Sentamu is the Church of England's second most senior clergyman and highest ranking African.  A Ugandan, his appointment as the Archbishop of York in June 2005 was a breakthrough in the history of the Church of England. He is the president of both Youth for Christ and the YMCA in the UK. Archbishop Sentamu is also chairman of the NHS Haemoglobinopathy Screening Programme.

Brian Stanley is Professor of World Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh School of Divinity. He has authored histories of Protestant missions and British imperialism (Apollos, 1990), the Baptist Missionary Society (T&T Clark, 1992), and the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Eerdmans, 2009).

Susan Abraham is Assistant Professor of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School where her research explores postcolonial and feminist theological practices as well as issues in theological education, interfaith peace initiatives, theology and political theory, religion and media, and global Christianities. She is the managing director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions.

 

Seminary students and faculty from all over the world, but particularly as based in the schools of theology, seminaries and university divinity schools of the Greater Boston (USA) area, will hold a conference sponsored by the Boston Theological Institute (BTI), the consortium of such schools. (A similar meeting was held in 1910 in Boston shortly after the one in Edinburgh.) The BTI conference will come toward the end of 2010, offering a summation and analysis of the previous “Edinburgh Conferences.”