The missions prayer network
Alongside the conference, Mission Fest Toronto ran a prayer network. Its premise was simple enough: that the work the conference existed to encourage depended on people praying for it, and that the prayer for a mission team should be as organised as the team itself.
3 prayer spaces, as the 2004 note describes them
The Intercessory Room
Built to reinforce the prayer happening in the tent, and to hold prayer, praise and worship on site. One part of it was set aside for personal prayer and for intercessors to rest between prayer walks.
The World Prayer Tent
Praise and prayer offered for the whole world on a rota of regions, in the middle of the exhibit hall rather than away from it.
The prayer chapel
The stream the conference navigation carried in its programme list, alongside the seminars and the plenary sessions.
What the network was for
The published description treated prayer as the connecting thread between every sphere a Christian might work in — home, workplace, school, the creative arts, government, the marketplace, the church or the mission field — rather than as a separate activity for a separate group of people. The network's aim was to gather individuals willing to intercede specifically on behalf of missions.
How it worked
Monthly meetings were held at varying locations, built around four repeated forms: learning and praying, worshipping and praying, listening and praying, and partnering and praying. The first meeting was held on 26 April 2018 at Christian Centre Church on Jane Street in North York, from 7:00pm to 9:30pm. Charmaine Hinds is named in the record as the network's lead.
Participation did not require attendance. The record lists four ways to take part: in person at the meeting location, by video conference, by sending a prayer request for a mission, business or para-ministry, and by forwarding the network's own prayer requests onward to other prayer networks.
Four areas of focus were offered to anyone joining: the conference itself, transformation mission, short-term missions, and missionaries. The stated intention was to link the prayer networks that already existed rather than to build a competing one.
Where this sits in the record
The prayer network was among the last initiatives the organisation started: its first meeting fell in the same year as the final regional conference. The published conference record ends in 2012 and the last event was held in 2018, so what survives here is a description of how the network was meant to work rather than an account of how long it ran.
The dating matters for reading it. The network was announced in the spring of 2018, in the same few weeks as a call for volunteers and a published statement that the organisation was entering a new season — three initiatives inside one month, from a body whose last full conference had been six years earlier. The regional event that July was the last one held. Whether the monthly meetings continued after the first is not something the published record answers: the page's final state asks readers to stay tuned for future events, and no later ones are listed.
The conferences themselves are recorded year by year in the conference archive, and the organisations that exhibited are listed in the directory of mission organizations.
Questions about the prayer network
Does the network still meet?
Not as far as the published record shows. Its first meeting was in April 2018, the last conference-related event was held that July, and the final version of the page asks readers to stay tuned for future events without listing any. No meeting after the first is documented.
What did it ask people to pray for?
Four areas were offered when joining: the conference itself, transformation mission, short-term missions, and missionaries. Participants could also send in a request for their own mission, business or para-ministry, which the network would circulate.
Did it require attending in person?
No. Four forms of participation were listed: attending the meeting, joining by video conference, e-mailing a prayer request in, and forwarding the network's requests to other prayer networks. The stated intention was to link existing networks rather than compete with them.
Why is there no way to join from this page?
The original carried a registration form asking for a name, e-mail, phone, city and area of prayer focus. Reproducing it would imply that something is on the other end of it. This page records what the network was and how it worked; it collects nothing and passes nothing on.
Prayer as a programme item, not only a network
The network was a late initiative, but prayer had been a scheduled part of the conference for years before it, and the 2004 programme documents that in more detail than the network's own pages ever reach. A World Prayer Tent ran a timetable by region: Asia West at one o'clock on the Friday, an exhibitors' prayer slot at two, Africa from four until half past six, the Pacific at seven, then Europe, North America and Latin America across the Saturday. Prayer was allocated rooms and hours in the same way seminars were.
The staff rosters carry the same shape from the organisational side, with a prayer team coordinator listed among the department heads and a prayer chapel appearing in the conference navigation as its own venue within the building. The 2010 report notes a queue outside the prayer chapel door on the Saturday, which is the only attendance observation about prayer anywhere in the record.
Read against that history, the 2018 network is a change of form rather than a new idea: what had been a tent, a chapel and a coordinator inside a weekend became a monthly meeting with four repeated forms — learning, worshipping, listening and partnering, each paired with praying — that did not depend on a conference happening at all. It is the one initiative the organisation started that could have outlived the event, and the published record does not show whether it did.