Archival record · programme record, 2004–2014

Ordinary Women…Extraordinary Call

The women's stream at Mission Fest Toronto ran under a fuller title than the navigation suggested: Ordinary Women…Extraordinary Call. The ellipsis was part of it.

The session, as the conference described it

The 2011 programme places it on the Saturday morning, from nine until eleven, at Global Kingdom Ministries on Markham Road. The invitation is unusually specific about who it was for: readers were told to come alone or to bring an entire women's group, and the age range named runs from high school through college and career to retirement, which is a wider span than any other stream in the programme addressed at once.

Its stated purpose was to equip those attending to become active participants in what the organisation called a missions revival, and to give them confidence about a call it assumed they already had. That is worth reading closely, because it defines the stream's function inside the weekend: not recruitment to a particular agency and not information about a field, but preparation of an audience the conference expected to act afterwards.

The Women's Forum of 2004, and what was said at it

Seven years earlier the conference ran what it called its first Women's Forum, and that one it wrote up afterwards. The account names Lorna Dueck of Listen Up TV as moderator and three speakers: Myles Munroe of Bahamas Faith Ministry, Pat Francis of Kingdom Covenant Centre, and Winnie Bartel of the World Evangelical Association. It estimates that more than 950 women attended — one of very few attendance figures anywhere in this record, and given as an estimate rather than a count.

The three arguments are summarised in enough detail to be reported. Munroe's turned on stewardship: that people were made to have charge of the earth and its resources and never of each other, and that following a calling might mean leaving a situation where that line had been crossed. Francis argued that the calling to leadership applies in the secular world as much as in the church and regardless of sex. Bartel's was the shortest and the most personal — that weakness is where strength comes from, and that the call on an individual life is that individual's to answer for.

An interactive question-and-answer session followed with a panel of four: Sheryl Lindberg of Women Aglow, Gaetane Marshal of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, Lynn Smith of Next Level Leadership, and Mary Audrey Raycroft of Releasers of Life. The write-up ends with the organisers hoping aloud that the forum could become an annual event.

Whether it did is almost, but not quite, unanswerable. One trace sits in the years between: the address of a registration form named for a 2007 Women's Forum. The form itself was never captured — the only snapshot of that address is an empty redirect recorded in 2021, years after the site went quiet — so the file name is the whole of the evidence, and a file name is thin evidence for an event. It is enough to say a 2007 forum was being registered for and not enough to say anything about it.

Nothing else appears between 2005 and 2010, and the next full appearance is the renamed stream of 2011. A gap in what was published is not a gap in what happened, and this is one of the places where the difference matters most.

How the stream was run

The conference's 2012 report credits Women Alive with co-presenting it. As with the other streams the arrangement was a partnership rather than an in-house programme: an organisation that already worked with that constituency ran the session inside the conference. The 2011 record also mentions a women's event among the weekend's stronger parts, in the same account that describes the men's stream and the Pastors' Brunch.

By 2015 the page at this address carried only a note asking readers to check back for the twentieth anniversary, and the stream does not appear in the record after 2014. The parallel streams were Men On A Mission, Singles and Pastors & Leaders; the wider programme is described on the seminars page, and the year-by-year record is in the conference archive.