Archival record · events calendar, 2010–2014

The events calendar Mission Fest Toronto kept for other groups

The conference was one weekend a year. The calendar was the rest of it: a listing service the organisation ran on its own site for events it was not putting on, from other churches, ministries and Christian organisations across the Greater Toronto Area.

What the surviving addresses show

No listing's own text survives, but the addresses do, and they describe the feature precisely. Each event had a page of its own at a numbered address with the event's date carried in the query string — the form was /site/events/<number>?date=<date>. Thirty distinct event numbers appear in the archived addresses, with dates running from October 2010 to September 2014.

Two further address forms show it was more than a list. Twelve of the events also had a /people page beneath them, so a listing could carry who was involved as well as what and when. And the index itself was paginated at least seven pages deep, which for a calendar of single-date entries means it was carrying a substantial number of them at once rather than a handful.

That is the whole of what can be said about the mechanism, and it is more than the conference ever wrote down about it. The calendar is not described in any of the organisation's own summaries of what it did.

What people were looking for when they arrived

The searches that reached individual listings name them, and they are the only evidence of what the calendar carried. A 2014 listing was reached by searches for Jesus in the City; another from the same summer by searches for the OneThing conference and for the International House of Prayer; a 2012 entry by searches for Malvern Christian Assembly; a 2011 one by searches for the Pregnancy Care Centre in Toronto; a 2013 entry by searches for a speaker, Ed Silvoso; and a 2011 entry by searches for events at Canada Christian College.

Those are other organisations' events, listed by a body that had no part in running them. It is the clearest evidence in the record that the conference saw itself as a hub for the missions constituency rather than only as an annual event — the same posture its own purpose statement takes, acted out in a piece of software rather than asserted in a paragraph.

The other half of the search traffic is more surprising and says something different. Listings were reached by searches for Toronto city hall events, for events in Toronto on a Saturday, for spiritual events in Toronto, for leadership training in the city, and for a venue address on Sheppard Avenue East. Those are not people looking for this organisation. They are people looking for something to go to, who found a Christian conference's calendar because it happened to be the page that listed it.

The calendar's own address was reached by searches for a Toronto events calendar — including, at the highest volume of any search in this family, a misspelling of the word calendar. A listings page ranks for the thing it lists, spelling included.

The two listings that survive with content

Most calendar entries are a title and a date and nothing else, which is why they are not rebuilt as pages here: a title alone is a fact about the calendar rather than a subject. Two are different, and both have pages of their own.

• The God's Not Dead screening listing — a film screening carried with the distributor's synopsis rather than a review, which makes it the one entry whose actual text survives at any length.
• The West Regional Conference listing — one of the organisation's own events, announced through the same calendar it used for everyone else's, with a venue, dates and a theme.

The second one is the more telling of the two. By 2018 the organisation was announcing its own conference the way it had spent eight years announcing other people's: as an entry in a circuit. The conference archive ends in 2012, and the calendar addresses run to 2014, so for the last stretch of the published record the listing service outlived the thing it was built alongside.

Where the film thread went

Film runs through this part of the record as more than one screening. Separate addresses existed for film nights, for film submissions, and for a documentary called The Enemy God, none of which survives with content. Read with the God's Not Dead listing, they suggest the calendar was the route by which a film reached this audience — a submission address implies someone was choosing between films rather than only reprinting what a distributor sent. Nothing in the record says who decided, or on what.

The conference's own years are set out in the archive, the programme streams that ran inside each weekend on the seminars page, and the organisations that exhibited in the directory.

Questions about the calendar