Archival record · conference report, 2012

The 2012 conference: the last in the published record

The theme was Moving Beyond Barriers-Together. Are You Ready?, and the report is the final full conference account the organisation published. It reads as a conference at its most organised rather than one winding down.

The organiser quoted in it calls it "by far the smoothest running operation" of any event they had run, crediting volunteers, staff, presenters, intercessors and partners. Four streams were co-presented that year by outside organisations: MissionGTA on the Pastors Day, Promise Keepers Canada on Men On A Mission, Women Alive on Ordinary Women…Extraordinary Call, and Lisa and Miguel Sanchez on the Mission Adventure Program.

The ENGAGE youth night was described as packed, with an attendance growing year on year; Nigel Paul of MoveIn spoke. Two Egyptian speakers, Sameh Hanna and Majed El Shafie, spoke on breakthroughs happening despite persecution — El Shafie also led one of that year's workshops. The report notes prayer going on not only in the prayer chapel but at the edges of the parking lot and in the exhibit areas.

Keynote platform: Majed El Shafie, Bettina Vasquez, Dave Toycen, Nigel Paul, Susan Finlay. Dates: April 12-14, at Global Kingdom Ministries. Later years are covered by the 2014 report and the 2017 transition notice.

What the last documented conference was about

The 2012 report is the last full one in the record, and its subject matter is more pointed than any year before it. The report says attendees were "enlightened to the truth of sex-trafficking in Canada" and had not known it existed — a domestic subject in a programme historically about sending people abroad. Alongside it: marketplace ministry, men's and women's ministry, and what the report calls missional outreach.

The platform matched the shift. Egyptian speakers Sameh Hanna and Majed El Shafie spoke about breakthroughs despite persecution. Dave Toycen — then of World Vision Canada — is the speaker the report quotes an attendee on at length: Treneta Bowden of Faith Arise Ministries relays his framing that "we are change agents for God" and his question, why we do what we do. Nigel Paul of MoveIn spoke at the ENGAGE youth night, which the report notes draws a larger attendance every year.

The executive director's own account

Sharon Ganesh, the executive director, is quoted directly and the sentence is unusual in a document like this: out of all the events she had organised, this was by far the smoothest running operation, thanks to volunteers, staff, presenters, intercessors and partners who gave sacrificially. The report's opening line makes the same point as a maxim — when you plan and prepare for the best, expect to rest.

Read with what followed, that is the record's quiet turning point. The best-run conference in the organisation's own assessment is also the last one it documented in full. Event reports continue to 2014 in a shorter form, promotional material to 2017, and the conference itself was paused in 2015 for an anniversary that the record never describes. Nothing in the 2012 document anticipates any of that.

Where 2012 sits in the run

Global Kingdom Ministries hosted the conferences of 2010, 2011, 2012, so 2012 is the last of that stretch. The theme was "Moving Beyond Barriers-Together. Are You Ready?" and the dates April 12-14. The keynote platform was Majed El Shafie, Bettina Vasquez, Dave Toycen, Nigel Paul, Susan Finlay, with Life-Spring Worship, ROLIM Praise 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, 2011 and 2014.

The report's subject matter also marks a change in what the conference thought it was for. Every earlier year describes sending — people, money, attention — outward from Toronto. 2012 devotes its first substantive paragraph to something happening in Canada that its own attendees did not know about. A missions conference whose most-reported session is about domestic trafficking has quietly redefined the word mission, and the record neither announces that nor argues about it.