Archival record · workshop series, 2012

The Moving Beyond Barriers workshop series

The conference listed this series under the initials MBB. Its description and the 2012 conference theme, "Moving Beyond Barriers-Together", say the same thing, which places the series in that year's programme.

The structure

Six one-hour seminar workshops, each built in two halves: identifying barriers to fulfilling the great commission and to living the Christian life, then how to move beyond them. The six subject areas were the church, culture, persecution and justice, marketplace ministry, global outreach, and prayer.

Who led them

The conference published biographies for the leaders, and the range is a fair picture of what it meant by marketplace ministry sitting next to persecution and justice on the same programme:

• Steve and Sandra, senior pastors at Catch the Fire Toronto — formerly Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship — since being commissioned in January 2006, at the church since 1994. Steve came from the Baptist tradition, pastored four congregations including two church plants, and graduated from Central Baptist Seminary in 1981.
• Bill Fietje, president of the Associated Gospel Churches from July 2008, and before that national director of OMF International Canada for eleven years and a church planter in Thailand across two terms. He earned a Doctor of Ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1999, and the conference credits his vision and leadership with helping to birth Mission Fest Toronto itself.
• Majed El Shafie, founder of One Free World International, who was imprisoned and tortured in Egypt after publishing a newspaper petitioning for equal rights for the Christian community, and relocated to Toronto after his release. He was also a keynote speaker in 2012.
• Jonathan Wellum, founder of RockLinc Investment Partners, previously chief executive of Portland Investment Counsel, named fund manager of the year in 1995 and 1997, with a master's degree in theology and philosophy alongside his finance qualifications.
• Ron Pearce, executive director and founder of Empower Ministries, whose stated approach was to find where the organisation could partner with national churches and bring those accounts back to Canadian congregations.
• Susan Finlay, founder and national director of Nation At Prayer, previously a human resources executive, and a governor of Tyndale University College and Seminary. She also keynoted in 2012.
• Kerry Carmichael, a business executive and board member with a particular interest in praying for government.

The wider seminar programme is described in the seminar record, and the 2012 conference in the archive.

Two of the six, in the conference's own words

The published biographies vary enormously in what they think a reader needs to know, and two of them show the range better than a summary can. For the culture session the conference introduced Bill Fietje through his positions: president of the Associated Gospel Churches from July 2008, before that Canada East superintendent for five years, and before that national director of OMF International Canada for eleven years, with two terms in Thailand as a church planter, a pastorate in Cambridge, Ontario, and a doctorate from Gordon-Conwell in 1999. The biography closes by crediting his vision and leadership with helping to birth both Mission Fest Toronto and MentorLink Canada — which is the only place in the whole record where a workshop leader is also named as a founder of the conference.

The persecution and justice session took a different register entirely. Majed El Shafie is introduced through an account of his own imprisonment: born in Cairo into a prominent Muslim family of lawyers, converted through a friend, he built a ministry that reached twenty-four thousand people with two churches built inside mountains, a Bible school and a medical clinic, and founded a newspaper asking the Egyptian government for equal rights for Christians. The paper was not tolerated. He was arrested, held in the torture section of Abu Zaabel prison for seven days, and released after intervention by Amnesty International and the United Nations, after which he relocated to Toronto and founded One Free World International.

That text is reproduced as the conference published it, because paraphrasing an account of torture is where a documentary record would start editorialising. What it shows about the programme is the range the series was designed to hold: a denominational president discussing culture at 5:30 on the Friday, and a torture survivor discussing persecution at ten the next morning, in the same room, in a series of one-hour slots.

The room, the clock, and what that implies

Every session in the series ran in Room 8, in one-hour slots across the Friday afternoon and the Saturday morning of the 2012 conference — 4:00pm and 5:30pm on the Friday, 10:00am and 11:30am on the Saturday, and so on through the six. A series in a single numbered room with back-to-back starts is a format decision: an attendee could sit through the whole sequence without moving, and the six subject areas were meant to be taken as one argument rather than picked from.

The marketplace session fits the same pattern. Jonathan Wellum is introduced through his investment career — Portland Investment Counsel from 1990, later the founder of RockLinc Investment Partners — rather than through any ministry role, which is what the conference meant by marketplace ministry in practice: not chaplaincy at work, but people who ran money and businesses talking about how that related to faith. Put beside the church, culture, persecution, global outreach and prayer sessions, the series is the clearest single statement of what the conference thought the barriers were.