What happened to the mission agencies on the roster

Mission Fest Toronto ran in the Greater Toronto Area from 1993 until 2018 and published the list of organizations that exhibited with it. That list is a snapshot of an entire sector at a moment in time. This is what is left of it.

The finding

79 of the 104 published addresses still lead somewhere: 68 answer directly and 11 redirect to a different host. 10 have no DNS record at all, and 15 resolve but returned nothing when requested.

The redirects are the most informative group. An organization that keeps its old domain pointed at a new one is usually telling you it was renamed or folded into a larger body, and the destination names the successor. Among them:

• Canada — www.omf.ca now answers at omf.org
• Canadian Lifelight Ministries — www.thelifelight.com redirects to biblesfortoday.com
• Christian Service Brigade — www.csbministries.ca sends a request on to oldpennymemories.co.uk
• Emanant Inc — www.emanantinc.com now answers at emanant.ca
• Frontiers (Friends in Formation) — frontierscanada.ca redirects to frontiers.ca
• Heritage College & Seminary — discoverheritage.ca sends a request on to heritagecs.edu

Two rosters, fifteen years apart

The 2003/04 exhibition hall assigned a numbered booth to each exhibitor, and that roster survives too. 17 of the organizations on the final list can be matched to a booth from that year, which puts them in the hall fifteen years before the conference ended.

• Action International Ministries booth 753
• Bridges for Peace booth 130
• Canadian Lifelight Ministries booth 132
• Gospel for Asia Canada booth 333
• Greater Europe Mission booth 327
• International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) Canada booth 935
• Latin America Mission (Canada) Inc. booth 936
• McMaster Divinity College booth 138
• Mission Possible Canada booth 448
• New Tribes Mission of Canada booth 323
• Open Doors Canada booth 236
• SIM (Serving In Mission) booth 332
• The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada booth 844
• The Scott Mission booth 141
• Transport for Christ booth 551
• WEC International booth 140
• Yonge Street Mission booth 941

How this was measured

Every address published on the roster was requested in July 2026. An address that failed on the first attempt was checked a second time by a different route: a DNS lookup, plain HTTP instead of HTTPS, and the www and bare forms of the same host. Five addresses that failed the first request answered on the second, and they are counted as working.

The four categories describe what a request to a domain name does. They do not describe whether an organization exists. A body that merged into another, moved onto a parent organization's site, or simply let a domain lapse produces the same result from outside, so nothing here should be read as a statement that an organization has closed.

What a redirect turns out to mean

Of the four states, the redirect is the one that rewards being read individually, and this roster has 11 of them. Eight are consolidation or renaming, and the destination says which: omf.ca now lands on omf.org/ca, the Canadian arm folded into an international site. New Tribes Mission of Canada answers as ethnos.ca, the organization having renamed itself. Frontiers Canada, Heritage College and Transport for Christ each moved to a shorter address of their own. Two carry a change of purpose in the new name itself — Missionary Ventures Canada now answers as Impact Hope, Canadian Lifelight Ministries as Bibles for Today. Perspectives Study Program moved under a parent's domain, which is the same story told a third way.

One is none of those. csbministries.ca, the address published for Christian Service Brigade, today redirects to a British site about collecting old pennies. Nothing merged and nothing was renamed: the registration lapsed and someone else registered the name. If the four states were collapsed into two — alive and dead — this entry would be filed as alive, which is exactly wrong, and the organization it names would be credited with a website about pennies.

That single case is why the status column reports what a request did rather than what it implies, and why the destination of every redirect is recorded on the entry. A domain that resolves and forwards is a domain that resolves and forwards. Reading further than that is the reader's decision, made with the destination in front of them.

The arithmetic that was wrong the first time

The first pass over this roster reported every address as reachable. The error was in the test rather than the data: it treated any numeric response code below 400 as a success, and a request that fails outright — no DNS, no connection, no response at all — reports code 000, which is a number below 400. Twenty-five dead addresses were counted as operating, and the figure published would have been 104 out of 104.

The check now requires a real response in the 100-399 range before an address counts as reachable, and every address is requested over HTTPS first and then over HTTP before being called silent. The four states are derived from what came back, not from the absence of an error. The figures on this page are from that second pass, and the chart above is generated from the same dataset at build time rather than transcribed, so a number in the prose and a bar in the figure cannot disagree.

It is worth stating plainly because a survival rate is the kind of figure that gets quoted without its method. Sixty-five per cent is what 79 of 104 addresses answering looks like in July 2026, measured once, by one method, on one day, with the failures separated into three kinds rather than one. Any other method would produce a different number.

Reuse this chart

The figures are baked into the page at build time, so they cannot drift from the dataset behind them. There is nothing to hotlink: to use the chart elsewhere, cite the numbers and link to this record.

<a href="https://missionfest.org/canadian-mission-agencies-report/">
  Canadian mission agencies: what happened to the 1993–2018 roster
</a>

Questions about the method

What twenty-two years does to a list of addresses

The two rosters behind this report are fifteen years apart, and the 2026 check sits seven years past the later one. That gives three points in time rather than a before and after, and the middle point is what makes the exercise informative: an organisation present in 2003/04 and again in 2019 survived a period that included the collapse of print directories, the arrival of social platforms as the default channel, and the end of the era when a small agency needed its own site at all.

Seventeen organizations can be matched across both rosters. That is not a survival rate — the 2003/04 record covers one hall in one year and the 2019 roster is the conference's own A-to-Z, so an organisation missing from the earlier list may simply not have booked a numbered stand that year. What the overlap does establish is a floor: at least seventeen were still exhibiting fifteen years later, which for a volunteer sector is a considerable continuity.

Against that, the addresses tell a harder story. Roughly a quarter of the roster no longer leads anywhere, and the failures are not concentrated among the obscure entries. Some of the organizations whose domains have gone silent are ones with recognisable names and a national presence, which is what you would expect if the cause is a lapsed renewal or a migration onto a parent's site rather than an organisation ceasing to exist.

What this measurement cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether an organisation is active. A domain is a communications choice, and by 2026 a small agency can be entirely findable through a social presence, a parent body's site or a diaspora network while its own registration sits unrenewed. The status column records what a request to a published address did, and every page that uses it says so.

It also cannot be projected forward. The figures are a single measurement taken on one day by one method, not a trend — there is no earlier equivalent check to compare against, because nobody was requesting these addresses in 2019 and writing down what happened. A second pass in 2030 would produce a comparable number; until then this is a level, not a slope.

And it says nothing about the sector's size. The 2010 event report counts two hundred exhibitors in a single year, nearly double the 104 names on the conference's own later roster — so the roster this report measures was already a subset of everyone who had ever taken a table. Whatever proportion of Canadian missions work these 104 organizations represented in 2019, it was smaller than the whole, and the record does not let anyone say by how much.

Why anyone should measure this at all

Sector-level questions about missions work in Canada are usually answered with self-reported figures: how many workers an agency claims, how much was given, how many countries are covered. Those numbers come from the organisations being counted, and there is no independent register to check them against.

A published address is different. It was chosen by the organisation, printed by a third party, and can be tested by anyone without asking permission — which makes it a poor measure of activity and an unusually honest one of continuity. It cannot be inflated, and the failure modes are enumerable rather than interpretive: no DNS record, silence, a redirect, or a page. That is the whole argument for this report existing, and it is also the limit of what it claims.