Archival record · events calendar listing

God's Not Dead in the events calendar

Alongside its own conferences, Mission Fest Toronto ran an events calendar that carried other organisations' events, including film screenings. The God's Not Dead films appear there.

The listing carried the distributor's synopsis rather than a review. For the second film it sets the story at Hope Springs, home to Hadleigh University and to Martin Luther King Jr. High School, where a teacher named Grace Wesley is taken to court over a classroom answer, and frames the premise as a question about whether Christians who do not take a stand will have the choice later.

Two things are worth noting about the listing rather than the film. The calendar was open to events the organisation did not run, which is consistent with its stated purpose of complementing existing efforts rather than duplicating them. And the release dates and venues it gave were Canadian, which is why this page is still found by people searching for exactly that.

The conference's own programme is recorded in the archive, and the film screenings the organisation itself put on are noted in the year reports.

Why a film screening is in a conference archive

The events calendar carried screenings alongside the conference's own programme, and this listing is one of them. It matters less as a film note than as evidence of what the organisation was doing between conferences: keeping a calendar, pointing an audience at things it had not organised, and treating film as part of the same mission conversation as a seminar.

That was not new. The conference had a film submissions page in its own navigation, and the 2004 programme documents a Visual Arts Corner and a Performing Arts Corner introduced on the stated reasoning that God speaks to people through art forms. A screening listing in the late calendar is the last surviving trace of a strand that ran through the whole record.

What the listing does not carry is a date, a venue or a partner, which is why this page is short. The calendar entry survived; its details did not. The films themselves are a third party's work and nothing about them is documented here beyond the fact that the conference pointed at them.