James KrabillJames R. Krabill is senior executive for Global Ministries at Mennonite Mission Network in Elkhart, Indiana. For fourteen years he served in West Africa, primarily the Ivory Coast, as a Bible and church history teacher among African Initiated Churche (AICs) in various village settings, Bible institutes and theological faculties. For eight of those years he lived and worked with members of the Harrist Church among Ivory Coast's Dida people-- collecting, recording, transcribing, and publishing over 500 original Harrist hymns for use in literacy and music training. Many of these hymns appeared in his published PhD thesis, The Hymnody of the Harrist Church (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). James is a frequent speaker in various church and academic settings across the United States and has lectured or taught courses in over a dozen countries. He holds memberships in the African Studies Association, the Association of Anabaptist Missiologists, the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (board of trustees), the Association of Mission Professors (president, 2009-10), and the American Society of Missiology (current chair of Scholarly Monograph Series).