Archival record · programme, 2004

The 2004 programme: work, the city, and a first Women's Forum

The programme published for the 2004 conference is the most detailed single programme in the surviving record. Its organising idea was that mission work included paid work — that business and professional people were, in the conference's phrase, "anointed ministers at work".

The Business Track

The track was facilitated by Gerry Organ, then executive director of CBMC Canada. His biography is one of the more unusual on the record: 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. He became a Christian in 1973 through Athletes in Action, took a master's degree at Ottawa in 1984, worked as a family therapist and as eastern director for Focus on the Family, and was on staff at The Peoples Church in Toronto from 1993 to 1997 before joining CBMC.

The session ran on the Friday afternoon of the conference, with admission charged separately and a conference passport included.

A first Women's Forum

The 2004 conference introduced a Women's Forum held inside the main event — the first time the programme carried one. It preceded the named women's stream, Ordinary Women…Extraordinary Call, which appears in the record later.

Children, worship and the urban focus

The children's programme that year was run as a "Super Church" by Bill and Sue, who led the children's renewal meetings at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship and whose Kids in Renewal Sunday school programme the conference said was in use in more than 800 churches. Worship across the weekend was led by Dan McCabe, previously lead singer of The Daniel Band, by then worship leader at Emmanuel Pentecostal Church in Port Perry.

The year's urban focus turned the conference's attention onto Toronto itself: a Saturday plenary with Glenn Smith and Greg Paul, a Sunday celebration service to which every church in the Greater Toronto Area was asked to send ten representatives, and a booth in the exhibit hall called A Heart For Toronto carrying literature from the participating urban ministries.

The 2004 conference ran under the theme "Here…and to the ends of the earth!" — see the conference archive for its keynote platform, and the business programme page alongside this one.

The World Prayer Tent, hour by hour

The oddest thing the 2004 programme documents is a schedule for prayer, timed to the region being prayed for. On the Friday: Asia West from one o'clock, an exhibitors' prayer slot at two, Asia West again, Africa from four until half past six, and the Pacific from seven. On the Saturday: Europe in the morning, North America from half past twelve, and Latin America and the Caribbean from four. The tent ran a timetable of continents.

That is not a devotional flourish, it is a programme item with a room, a clock and a rota, and it tells you how the conference understood its own subject. Missions on this account is geographic and enumerable — the world divided into regions, each allocated a slot, with the exhibitors themselves getting half an hour between Asia and Africa. No other year in the record documents the prayer programme at this resolution.

The children's programme and its presenters

The 2004 children's programme ran in Room 701 across all three days — Friday evening, three separate Saturday blocks, and Sunday afternoon — under the name Super Church. Its presenters are introduced with the same detail the adult platform gets: Bill and Sue, who had ministered for over twenty years and were at the time at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, having founded that church's children's renewal meetings and published a Sunday school programme the conference says was in use in more than eight hundred churches worldwide.

A conference that schedules children into four separate blocks and books presenters with a published curriculum is treating the children's programme as a track rather than as childcare. That distinction runs through the whole 2004 document: every audience gets a room number, a time and a named presenter, from the business track in Room 718 to the children in 701.

The Women's Forum, in its first year

The forum ran the full Saturday, nine until five, and the programme presents it as new: for the first time the conference was offering a Women's Forum within the conference itself, with the stated goal of empowering Christian women in Canada. Three speakers are named — Myles Munroe, Pat Francis and Winnie Bartel — and the page links to fuller biographies that did not survive.

It is worth noting what the record does and does not let you conclude. The forum appears here in 2004 as an innovation; a women's programme appears again in the 2011 and 2014 reports with different presenters and a different name. Whether the later programmes descend from this forum or were started afresh is not stated anywhere, so this page says the first is documented in 2004 and stops there.