Mae Elise Cannon serves as senior director of advocacy and outreach - Middle East for World Vision USA. She is a minister, writer and academic who cares deeply about God's heart for the poor and the oppressed. She is the author of Social Justice Handbook: Small Steps for a Better World (IVP, 2009) and Just Spirituality: How Faith Practices Fuel Social Action (IVP, 2013). Cannon is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), was formerly the executive pastor of Hillside Covenant Church in Walnut Creek, California, and has served as director of development and transformation for extension ministries at Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois. Prior to joining… World Vision, Mae lived in East Jerusalem and served as a consultant to the Middle East for child advocacy issues for Compassion International. Cannon holds an M.Div. From North Park Theological Seminary, an M.B.A. from North Park University's School of Business and Nonprofit Management, and an M.A. in bioethics from Trinity International University. She is now a doctoral candidate in American History with a minor in Middle Eastern studies at the University of California - Davis, focusing her dissertation on the history of the American Protestant church in Israel and Palestine.
Hays is Dean of the Divinity School and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of several important studies in the New Testament, including Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989), The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996), The Faith of Jesus Christ (2nd ed. 2002), and The Conversion of the Imagination (2005).Soong-Chan Rah (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) is Milton B. Engebretson Associate Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity and Many… Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church, as well as coauthor of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith and contributing author for Growing Healthy Asian American Churches.In addition to serving as founding senior pastor of the multi-ethnic, urban ministry-focused Cambridge Community Fellowship Church (CCFC), Rah has been a part of four different church-planting efforts and served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Boston. He has been an active member of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition (an urban ministry working with at-risk youth) and is a founding member of the Boston Fellowship of Asian-American Ministers. He serves on the boards of World Vision, Sojourners, the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) and the Catalyst Leadership Center. An experienced cross-cultural preacher and conference speaker, Rah has addressed thousands around the country at gathering like the 2003 Urbana Student Missions Conference, 2006 Congress on Urban Ministry, 2007 Urban Youth Workers Institute Conference, 2008 CCDA National Conference, 2010 Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) National Preaching Conference and the 2011 Disciples of Christ General Assembly. He and his wife Sue have two children and live in Chicago.