Archival record · conference report, 2011

The 2011 conference: Luis Palau, and more than twenty seminar topics

The 2011 report leads on teamwork — "amazing teamwork", in its own phrase — and on a programme that by then ran four parallel streams for men, women, youth and children under the theme We're All In This Together.

Luis Palau headed the platform. The report quotes a note of thanks sent afterwards on his behalf, saying he "had an absolutely wonderful time at MissionFest" and that everything ran like clockwork. The men's stream, Men On A Mission, was run in partnership with Promise Keepers Canada.

The seminar programme is the part of this report that shows how wide the conference had become: more than twenty topics, including "Politics of Missions to Muslims", "Creative Arts: Opening Doors in Tough Places" and "Global Asia: Catching Up with Asia on the Move". Worship was led by Jody Cross, the ROLIM praise team and Aaron Boghossian.

One quoted account is about the children's programme rather than the platform: a Brad Saunders of World Vision describes a nine-year-old who had been in the kids' programme telling him a week later that she had started fundraising for children in the developing world.

Keynote platform: Luis Palau, Patrick Fung, Ron Cline, Brett Ullman, Nizar Shaheen, Melinda Estabrooks, Marva Tyndale. Dates: April 1-2, at Global Kingdom Ministries. See the conference archive.

The first men's programme, and what the partnership pattern looked like

2011 is the year the men's stream ran for the first time, and the report is specific about how: in partnership with Promise Keepers Canada, with Kirk Giles and Luis Palau speaking. That is the conference's whole method in one line — an existing organisation brought its constituency and its speaker, the conference supplied the hall and the audience, and neither had to build the other's programme.

The same year ran a women's programme with Melinda Estabrooks and Marva Tyndale, a youth programme with Brett Ullman that the report describes as over capacity, and a children's programme. Four audiences in parallel, in a church rather than a convention centre. The report's phrase for the youth session — challenging a younger generation to see through the deceptions of media, faith and culture — is the only description of session content anywhere in that year's material.

What the report chose as evidence

Three quotations carry the year, and none of them is about attendance. Jane Stradley, Luis Palau's personal assistant, thanks the organisers for how Palau was looked after and reports that everything went like clockwork — a note about logistics from the one perspective that would notice. Brad Saunders of World Vision tells a second-hand story instead: a nine-year-old who had been in the children's programme approached him at another event a week later to say she had started fundraising for children in the developing world.

That is a deliberate choice of evidence. A conference reporting on itself could publish a number; this one published a child's follow-up action, relayed by a third party. Worship is credited to Jody Cross, the ROLIM praise team and Aaron Boghossian. The report's own headline for the year — "Mission accomplished, 2011 theme fulfilled" — refers back to the theme, "We're All In This Together", and argues that the teamwork the theme described was the thing the weekend actually produced.

Where 2011 sits in the run

Global Kingdom Ministries hosted the conferences of 2010, 2011, 2012, so 2011 is the middle of that stretch. The theme was "We're All In This Together" and the dates April 1-2. The keynote platform was Luis Palau, Patrick Fung, Ron Cline, Brett Ullman, Nizar Shaheen, Melinda Estabrooks, Marva Tyndale, with ROLIM Praise, Aaron Boghossian, Jody Cross, Rosewood Drama Team credited for worship.

None of that platform appears in any other documented year, which is the usual case here: across all seventeen conferences only four speakers ever returned. The speakers record lists every year's platform together, and the archive carries this year alongside the rest. The other years that published a report of their own are 2010, 2012 and 2014.

One further detail from that year's report belongs on the record because it is the only place a conference session is described as changing anyone's plans in writing: Brad Saunders' account of the nine-year-old is second-hand, dated a week after the weekend, and attributed. Nothing else in seventeen years of published material tracks an outcome that far past the event.