Archival record · business programme, 2003–2004

The business and marketplace programme

From 2003 the conference ran a strand for people in business and the professions. The premise was that the workplace was itself a mission field, and that the people in it needed a programme of their own rather than a seat at the general sessions.

How it started

The 2003 conference introduced a roundtable discussion of business executives, described in the record as executives taking an active role in the conference and presenting how their faith was integrated into their workplace. The following year it became a named track, Anointed for Business, introduced alongside the Visual Arts Corner, the Performing Arts Corner and the Refugee Highway.

What the track contained

The fullest description belongs to 2004, on the programme page for that year: a Friday afternoon session facilitated by Gerry Organ of CBMC Canada, charged separately from general admission, framed around what the conference called a whole new marketplace paradigm.

Business people continued to appear on the programme after the track itself stopped being named separately — Jonathan Wellum of RockLinc Investment Partners led one of the 2012 workshops on marketplace ministry, and Tom Caldwell was a keynote speaker in 2002.

This page carries no surviving text of its own; what is above is drawn from the conference's programme pages and event reports. The year-by-year record is in the archive.

Why this address holds so little

This page has its own URL because the conference gave it one, and it is kept at that address because external pages still point here. What survives at it, though, is a fragment: the version of this page in the published record carries the conference's contact block and a link onward, with the business programme's actual content living on the main 2004 programme page instead.

That page describes the programme this address was created for, and it is worth reading here in summary. The business track ran on the Friday afternoon of the 2004 conference, four until seven, in Room 718 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Admission was twenty dollars and included a passport to the rest of the conference; a table of ten could be sponsored for two hundred dollars by an individual or a thousand by a corporation. The structure was a reception, a keynote, an executive roundtable and breakout sessions, in that order, across three hours.

Who ran it

Rick Heeren, vice-president of Harvest Evangelism, gave the keynote. Michael Coren hosted the roundtable. The facilitator was Gerry Organ, then executive director of CBMC Canada, and his published biography is the most detailed of any presenter in the 2004 material: a professional footballer with the Ottawa Rough Riders from 1971 to 1983, on two Grey Cup championship teams, voted outstanding Canadian player in 1973 and second in all-time CFL scoring at his retirement, then a master's degree at Ottawa in 1984, a decade as a family therapist and Eastern director for Focus on the Family, four years on staff at the Peoples Church in Toronto, and finally CBMC.

The programme's own framing was that God had called business and professional leaders to be, in its words, anointed ministers at work, and that the 2004 conference would challenge everyone to adopt a new marketplace paradigm. Whatever one makes of the language, the personnel show what the conference meant by it: a CFL scoring record and a therapy practice were treated as the relevant qualifications for talking to a room of executives, rather than a missions posting.

One detail of the pricing is worth keeping because it dates the whole exercise. Twenty dollars bought admission and a conference passport; a thousand dollars bought a corporate table of ten. The ratio between those two numbers is the argument the programme was making — that a business audience was worth approaching as sponsors rather than only as attendees, and that a table of colleagues was the unit it expected them to arrive in.

The wider 2004 programme this page belongs to is documented in full at the programme page, including the Women's Forum that ran the following day and the regional prayer timetable. Both are kept at the addresses the conference used rather than folded into one page, because that is where external references still point.