Scott Bessenecker is associate director of missions for Global Projects at Intervarsity Christian Fellowship in Madison, Wis. As a member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, the organization sends teams of students to work with African churches in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana on short-term projects. Contact  him via the website.

Amy Parodi is deputy director of media relations for World Vision, based in Federal Way, Wash. The Christian relief and development organization’s activities include building health clinics, sponsoring peace-building initiatives and addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.

The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Richmond, Va., sends missionaries “sharing the good news of Jesus Christ” in Africa.

• Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., has an HIV/AIDS initiative to bring churches together to help stop the spread of HIV and AIDS globally. Contact initiative founder Kay Warren.

The Rev. Dermot S. Roache is director of the Society of African Missions House of Studies in Dedham, Mass. The American province of the missionary group, based in Tenafly, N.J., has priests tending to the spiritual and social needs of Africans in 16 countries, including Liberia, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania.

Kim Pozniak is communications officer for Sub-Saharan Africa at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore. Catholic Relief does emergency response, such as shelter and famine relief, and long-term projects in education, agriculture and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in more than 30 African countries.

The Rev. Jonathan Bonk is executive director of Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn., a renewal center for missionaries of all Christian denominations. He is the project director of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography and editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Linda E. Thomas, professor of theology and anthropology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has written about survival and resistance in an African indigenous church and about ritual process and spiritual resilience in South Africa.

• Dana Robert is professor of world Christianity and history of mission and director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University School of Theology. She is the editor of African Christian Outreach, Vol. 2: Mission Churches (Southern African Missiological Society, 2003) and co-editor of Frontiers of African Christianity (Unisa Press, 2003).