The Mission Fest Toronto conference archive, year by year
Mission Fest Toronto published a record of each conference it held. 17 years survive in full, from 1996 to 2012, with the theme, the dates, the keynote speakers and the hall it was held in. They are reproduced here in the conference's own terms.
The venues track the size of the thing. It began at Peoples Church, moved through the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and the Toronto Congress Centre in its largest years, and the last documented conferences were held at Global Kingdom Ministries.
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2012 Moving Beyond Barriers-Together. Are You Ready?
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2011 We're All In This Together
I had a nine year old girl come up to me at another event a week later to say she was part of the MissionFest kids program and was inspired to do some fundraising to help children in the developing world. That little girl is having a Kingdom impact thanks to MissionFest!
Brad Saunders, World Vision -
2010 Called According to His Purpose
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2009 for His name's sake
It is a startling fact that nearly 97% of Evangelicals in North America do not share their faith in Christ. Most don't even mention it. We need to repent and get back to a lifestyle of sharing, of being a credible witness for Christ and of understanding the times and seasons we are living in. We need to know what to do and how to do it. This is where MissionFest can be of great service to you".
Jude Hodgson, Executive Director -
2008 Making A Difference
Envision yourself entering a whole new world that you didn't know existed, where people of diverse colours, cultures and characters welcome you with warm smiles and wonderful stories, that are unified in one message, the Great Commission. Well, this place does exist. It's called MissionFest Toronto, an exciting world of extraordinary characters, sights and sounds".
John Verdone, Chair, Board of Directors -
2007 We Speak to Nations!
…because of someone who met me at MFT, we are now selling our home, packing the family and moving to Germany…to serve at the Black Forest Academy as dorm parents".
Jim Paterson, Artist -
2006 In UNITY of PURPOSE
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2005 Ten Years of Celebration
The image I have is of a rising tide that lifts all vessels and thus enables all to fulfill their individual callings. Along the edge of the ocean are many boats; from canoes, kayaks…to larger craft such as yachts and catamarans. Our vision is to stimulate mission awareness and involvement in a manner that benefits every shape of mission enterprise, small and large, simple and sophisticated, so that all will benefit!
Ken Little, Chair, Board of Directors, 2005 -
2004 Here…and to the ends of the earth!
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2003 Let the Nations Be Glad
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2002 What Can I Do?
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2001 The Persecuted Church
MissionFest Toronto is designed for the whole family; for adults, youth and children. Young people are the Christian leaders of tomorrow and the missionaries of tomorrow.
Marie-Lucie Spoke, Managing Director -
2000 Hope?
MissionFest we need! In a postmodern age of heightened self-interest, the church needs the kind of creative drive and Spirit boldness that MissionFest provides. I praise God for their gifts of vision and leadership".
Brian C. Stiller -
1999 GO
By the grace of God, this is our 4th year gathering God's people to celebrate the Lord's work of missions…we hope to motivate and mobilize the minds of God's people to take stock of the state of our world. The mix of speakers and seminars will inform and enable you for the task".
Dr. Philip Wood, Chair, Steering Committee & Board of Director -
1998 Shake, Rattle & Go
Missions is Christians reaching out cross-culturally to neighbours, in Toronto or around the world. It involves the church stretching beyond its comfort zone to those who know nothing of the Gospel. The task can only be done as pastors, churches, parishioners, missionaries and mission leaders, talk together, pray together and work together. This is the purpose of MissionFest".
Dr. Irving A. Whitt, Chairman of Missions, Ontario Theological Seminary -
1997 Celebrating God's Work in the World
I covered MissionFest Toronto's first events as a reporter for The Endeavour and was inspired by Philip Wood's vision ‘to celebrate those people and organizations that are taking Christ to the world.' Little did I imagine that 13 years later I would be the Canadian director of one of those missions".
Linda Haist, Canadian Director, MECO -
1996 Celebrating God's Work in the World
What is not here
The published record runs to 2012. After it the conference continued on a smaller footing, with regional events rather than the single large gathering, and the last of those was held in 2018.
Seventeen years, two kinds of building
The venue is the only thing the record measures the same way every year, so it is the one series worth drawing. Each row below is one conference: a church on the left track, a rented hall on the right.
17 conferences · 6 in a church, 11 in a rented hall
- 1996 Peoples Church
- 1997 Peoples Church
- 1998 Metro Convention Centre
- 1999 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2000 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2001 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2002 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2003 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2004 Metro Toronto Convention Centre
- 2005 Queensway Cathedral
- 2006 Toronto Congress Centre
- 2007 Toronto Congress Centre
- 2008 Toronto Congress Centre
- 2009 International Centre
- 2010 Global Kingdom Ministries
- 2011 Global Kingdom Ministries
- 2012 Global Kingdom Ministries
What the themes were doing
Read the seventeen themes in order and they stop being decoration. The first two years repeat one line — "Celebrating God's Work in the World", 1996 and 1997 — and then the register changes: "Shake, Rattle & Go", then a bare "GO", then "Hope?" for the millennium year, then "The Persecuted Church" for 2001. Three of the seventeen end in a question mark, and all three fall in the early 2000s: "Hope?", "What Can I Do?", and the last documented year's "Moving Beyond Barriers-Together. Are You Ready?".
The middle years mark themselves: "Ten Years of Celebration" in 2005, "In UNITY of PURPOSE" the year after. The final stretch turns inward and organisational — "Making A Difference", "Called According to His Purpose", "We're All In This Together" — which is what a conference sounds like when it is talking to the people already in the room rather than to the city outside it. The record does not comment on that, and neither does this page beyond noting the order they came in.
The rest of the record, page by page
Everything else the conference published that survives in usable form, grouped by what it is. Each page keeps the address it had.
Conference reports
Each year the conference published a report of what happened.
The events calendar
The listing service the organisation ran for other groups' events, and the two entries whose own text survives.
The 2018 notices
The last two things the organisation published about itself.
Programme streams
The conference ran parallel programmes for different audiences.
Taking part
What the conference asked of exhibitors, volunteers and attendees.
Programmes as published
Two programme pages kept at their original file paths.
Elsewhere in the record
The remaining pages the conference published.
Questions about this archive
Why does the year-by-year record stop at 2012?
Because that is the last year the conference published a full account of itself — theme, dates, venue and platform. Event reports continue to 2014 and promotional material to 2017, and both are indexed below, but they are summaries rather than programme records. The final event on record is a two-day regional conference in Milton in October 2018.
Where do the themes, dates and speaker lists come from?
From the conference's own published material for each year. Nothing here is reconstructed from secondary accounts, and where a field is empty — several years list no worship artists at all — it is empty because none was published, not because none performed.
Why are the quotations only on some years?
10 of the 17 documented years carry a testimonial or attendee quotation alongside the record; the rest do not. Those quotations are reproduced with the speaker and their organization named, exactly as the conference published them, and none has been supplied for a year that lacked one.
Is every surviving page listed here?
Every page with usable content is, in the index below — the programme streams, the event reports, the 2018 notices, the exhibitor and volunteer material, the testimonials. Addresses whose content did not survive resolve to this page rather than answering an error, which is why a search result for a long-gone calendar entry lands here.