Diana Butler Bass is an expert in American religion who works as an author, speaker, and independent scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University and is the author of six books on American religious practice, including Christianity for the Rest of Us and The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church. From 2002 to 2006, she was the project director of a national Lilly Endowment-funded study of mainline Protestant vitality. Bass has taught at Westmont College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Macalester College, Rhodes College, and the Virginia Theological Seminary.
Ted A. Smith is assistant professor of ethics and society as well as director of the Program in Theology and Practice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Smith teaches and writes across the fields of ethics, homiletics, and social theory. In each of these fields he tries to do public theology through critical reflection on everyday church life. Ordained to ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA), Smith has served as pastor to two small-membership churches in rural New York State. He is the author of The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice.
Darrell Guder is Princeton Theological Seminary's dean of academic affairs and the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he focuses his writing and teaching on the theology of the missional church, especially the theological implications of the paradigm shift to post-Christendom as the context for Christian mission in the West. He is the editor of Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, and editor and author of The Continuing Conversion of the Church: Evangelization as the Heart of Ministry, among other publications.
Arun Jones is associate professor of mission and evangelism at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in The United Methodist Church, Jones has served congregations in Connecticut and New Jersey as well as serving as a missionary in the Philippines. He teaches courses on the worldwide mission of the church, the church in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the history of evangelism in the United States. He is the author of Christian Missions in the American Empire: Episcopalians in Northern Luzon, the Philippines, 1902-1946.