Archival record · conference report, 2014

The 2014 conference: Let Your Light Shine

By 2014 the conference no longer published the full year-by-year record it had kept until 2012, but a report for this year survives. Its theme was "Let Your Light Shine", and the account leans on the number of new exhibitors as the sign that the thing was still growing.

Six parallel programmes are named: for pastors, leaders, men, women, youth and children. The ENGAGE youth night was addressed by Andrew Alleyne, and the report notes a young attendee who came away with the idea of using mime and dance in mission work — the kind of specific outcome these reports tend to record in place of attendance figures.

Neil Boron of WDCX Radio spoke to the men's programme, on being useful regardless of where a person's life had started. WDCX broadcasts into the Toronto area from across the border, and its involvement is a reminder of how much of the conference's audience was reached by radio rather than by mailing list.

2014 is the last conference for which a report survives. What happened afterwards is described in the transition notice and the 2018 regional conference. The full record is in the archive.

Who spoke, and to whom

By 2014 the programme is described audience by audience rather than as a single platform, and the report names a presenter for each. Andrew Alleyne of Catalyst Ministries took the ENGAGE youth night and is quoted on its result: a young woman who had been on mission trips before told him afterwards that a vision for using her gift of miming and dancing to reach people in other nations had been born that Friday. Neil Boron of WDCX Radio spoke to the men. Rachelle Mainse spoke to women from across the Greater Toronto Area. A children's programme ran alongside all of it.

The audience list itself is longer than any earlier year's: pastors, leaders, men, women, youth and children. That is six parallel streams, and it is the clearest measure of what the conference had become by its last documented years — less a single hall with a keynote and more a set of concurrent programmes sharing a venue and a weekend.

The theme, and the report's own register

"Let Your Light Shine! Here, There, Everywhere" is the year's theme, and the report treats it as something the weekend had to fulfil rather than decorate: the theme became a reality, it says, through the teamwork of speakers, exhibitors, artists, volunteers, intercessors, service providers, partners and staff. The list is worth noticing — intercessors and service providers are named alongside speakers, which is how an organisation writes when the people doing the unseen work are reading the report too.

New exhibitors are the first thing the document mentions, before any speaker: the conference welcomed many new organisations showcasing their call. For an event that had paused once and would pause again, a fresh intake of exhibitors was the metric that mattered, and it is the last time the record reports one.

Why 2014 has no conference record beside it

The published conference record — theme, dates, venue, platform — stops in 2012, but event reports continue two years past it. So this document describes a conference that the archive does not otherwise document: there is no venue, no dates and no keynote list for 2014 in the material this record is built from, only the report's own account of who spoke to which audience.

That asymmetry is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The conference kept publishing reports after it stopped publishing programmes, which is the order in which a volunteer organisation loses its documentation: the outward-facing summary survives longest, the operational detail goes first. The conference archive therefore ends in 2012 while this page and the 2018 notices sit past its edge, and the gap between them is not a gap in the events but in what was written down. The years that did publish a report are 2010, 2011 and 2012.

What the 2014 report does keep from every earlier year is the list of people it thanks. Speakers, exhibitors, artists, volunteers, intercessors, service providers, partners and staff — eight categories, in an organisation with two paid roles. That list is the same in 2010, 2011 and 2012, and it is the most consistent single feature of the conference's own writing about itself.