Canadian missions movement history: the ministries in Toronto

In 1993 a group of mission and church leaders in the Greater Toronto Area met to discuss bringing a missions conference to the city. Missions Fest Vancouver and Missions Fest Alberta had shown it could work. Three years later the first Mission Fest Toronto opened at the Peoples Church, and it ran for more than two decades. What follows is a Canadian missions movement history told through that one conference: the ministries that founded it, the people who passed through it, and the point at which it stopped.

The founding and the ministries behind it

Philip Wood, Bob Morris, Bill Fietje were the leaders most closely associated with starting it, alongside others whose names appear in the conference's own account. Albert Wai of SEND International, its honorary director, described the group as "willing to be submissive in humility to undertake a task they knew was too big for them".

It was a volunteer movement, driven by churches but drawing in mission agencies and Christian educational bodies — the pattern most of the Canadian missions movement history of that period follows, where the institutions came after the volunteers rather than before them. The first steering group, listed for 1996, shows how wide that net was: Gerry Anderson of IVCF, Margaret Cheung of the Scott Mission, Justin Dennison of Bramalea Baptist Church, Joe Elkerton of First Nation Gospel Assembly, Bill Fietje of OMF, John Hull of the Peoples Church, Douglas Lynn of Crossroads Cathedral, Bob Morris of Interserve, Arnell Motz of SIM, Minho Song of Young-Nak Korean Presbyterian, Barbara Sparks of Emmanuel Bible College, Irving Whitt of Ontario Theological Seminary and Philip Wood of WEC.

Sixteen ministries were named as having exhibited from the beginning: Action International Ministries, I.V.C.F, African Inland Mission, Janz Team Ministries, Arab World Ministries, Latin America Mission, Bridges for Peace, MECO, Briercrest Schools, Mission Aviation Fellowship of Canada, International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, OMF International, Child Evangelism Fellowship, OMS International, Chosen People Ministries, Open Doors.

A Toronto missions conference that grew, then contracted

The first two conferences were held at the Peoples Church. From 1998 the conference moved to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, then to the Toronto Congress Centre for its largest years, and by 2010 to Global Kingdom Ministries. The 2007 record notes more than twenty thousand attendances across three days.

The tenth anniversary fell in 2005, marked under the theme "Ten Years of Celebration" at Queensway Cathedral, with keynote speakers including Kathy Mainse, Ed Silvoso, Loren Cunningham, Cal Bombay, Dr. Fletcher A. Brothers. Cal Bombay, whose ministry work is still searched for by name, spoke that year.

The ministries and people who passed through it

Across the 17 documented conferences, 79 people are listed as keynote speakers. The range is a reasonable picture of Canadian evangelical missions interest over two decades: Franklin Graham and Anne Graham Lotz, Tony Campolo, Ravi Zacharias, Luis Palau, Brother Andrew, George Verwer, Loren Cunningham, Kim Phuc, Shane Claiborne, Afshin Javid and Majed El Shafie among them. The full year-by-year list is in the conference archive, and the people are indexed on the speakers page.

What the conference added to itself, year by year

The notes the conference attached to individual years are the closest thing the record has to minutes, and they show an event that kept bolting on new parts. In 2003 a roundtable of business executives was introduced, described as executives taking an active role by presenting how their faith was integrated in their workplace — the same year that produced the business track and, the year after, a first Women's Forum. In 2004 a Visual Arts Corner and a Performing Arts Corner appeared, on the stated reasoning that God speaks to people through art forms.

2005 is marked in the record as the tenth anniversary, and the wording of the note is worth keeping because of what it claims: congratulations to the team for a decade of adventure and faith as contributors to a movement that desires to bring Christians together. That is the conference describing itself as a contributor to something larger rather than as the thing itself — the same posture as the 1996 account, which dates the founding to the churches that had banded together for Billy Graham's Global Mission Ontario crusade the year before.

The additions have a direction. Early years add audiences — men, women, singles, pastors, children, youth. Middle years add formats: the roundtable, the arts corners, the workshop series. Late years add structures rather than programme: a prayer network in 2018, a change of leadership announced in 2017, regional chapters instead of one central weekend. An organisation that spends its last documented years reorganising rather than programming is telling you something, and the record does not say it in words.

The sixteen that were there from the start

The conference named sixteen ministries as having exhibited from the beginning, and the list is a cross-section of the 1990s Canadian missions scene: Action International Ministries, IVCF, Africa Inland Mission, Janz Team Ministries, Arab World Ministries, Latin America Mission, Bridges for Peace, MECO, Briercrest Schools, Mission Aviation Fellowship of Canada, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, OMF International, Child Evangelism Fellowship, OMS International, Chosen People Ministries and Open Doors.

Four things stand out in it. Two are schools rather than sending agencies, which is the recruitment function the hall always had. Three work in or about the Middle East — Arab World Ministries, MECO, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem — a weighting that reflects where Canadian churches were looking at the time. Mission Aviation Fellowship is there because a missions conference in the 1990s still needed to explain logistics to its own supporters. And several of these names no longer exist in that form: Janz Team became Avant Ministries, Arab World Ministries merged into Pioneers, and Africa Inland Mission's Canadian address has since moved.

Which of them survived as addresses is measurable rather than a matter of impression, and it is measured in the status report. Where a founding exhibitor appears on the later roster, its entry in the directory carries both the address the conference published and what that address does today.

Where it was held, and what that cost

Seven venues carry 17 conferences, and the sequence is the plainest evidence the record offers about scale. The first two are at the Peoples Church. The Metro Toronto Convention Centre takes six of the middle years, the Toronto Congress Centre three; Queensway Cathedral and the International Centre take one each. The last three documented years are at Global Kingdom Ministries in Scarborough — a church again.

A convention centre is booked and paid for; a church hall is usually lent or hired cheaply. Moving one way is growth, and the record treats it that way. Moving back is not explained anywhere in the published material, and this account will not supply a reason it does not have. What can be said is the shape: the venues expand for roughly a decade from 1999, hold, and then contract, and the contraction is complete two years before the last documented conference.

The final act is documented but not narrated. Event reports continue to 2014, two years past the last full conference record. Promotional material continues to 2017. In the spring of 2018 three things were published within a month of each other — a leadership change, a call for volunteers, and a prayer network — and the last event on record is a two-day regional conference at the MBC Conference Centre in Milton that October. After it, nothing. No closing statement was published, which is itself the most common way a volunteer organisation ends.

The names that recur

A handful of people appear across the record in more than one capacity, which is what a volunteer organisation looks like from the inside. John Hull chaired from the Peoples Church in the founding group and took the platform as a speaker in 2010. Bill Fietje of OMF sat on the first steering group and is cited as chairman of the board in a testimonial about the 2002 conference. Sharon Ganesh appears as executive director in the later staff rosters and again in the 2017 notice that announced her stepping down after seven years, with Wayne Hinds named as interim director. Jason Brown holds three coordinator roles at once in one staff list — facilities, parking and security.

That overlap is the practical answer to how a conference of this size was run by volunteers: the same people did several jobs, and the people who founded it were still on the platform and the board fifteen years later. It is also why the record thins when they stop being listed. The organisation and the roster of names are close to the same thing, and when the names stop appearing in the published material there is nothing else left to document — no institution carrying on behind them, no successor body, no archive handed to anyone.

Reading this Canadian missions movement history

Any Canadian missions movement history assembled from a single city's conference carries that city's bias, and this one is no exception. Everything above comes from the conference's own published record, so where that record ends the account ends: the last documented conference is 2012, regional events continued to 2018, and no conference has been held since. The organizations that exhibited are listed separately in the directory of mission organizations, with a note on which of their addresses still answer.

Questions about this history