Archival record · programme record, 1996–2014

The seminar programme

Seminars were part of Mission Fest Toronto from the first conference. The published description of the 1996 event lists prayer sessions, seminars, plenary sessions, a youth programme, a children's programme and 77 exhibitors — and that shape held, with variations, across all 17 documented years.

What the seminars were for

The division of labour was consistent: plenary sessions carried the keynote speakers and the large audience, while the seminars were where a specific subject got an hour and a smaller room. The conference's stated objective was to educate people in the biblical basis of mission work and in current world missions, and the seminar programme was the part of the weekend that did that directly.

The one year whose grid survives in full

Most years published a seminar schedule and most of those schedules are gone. The 2003 grid is not: it survives with every slot filled in, and it is the closest thing this record holds to a picture of what the programme actually was. 49 sessions ran across the Saturday and the Sunday, presented by 28 named organisations, in rooms numbered in the 200s plus one in Hall A, with as many as twelve running at once.

The subject range is wider than the conference's own summaries of itself suggest. Within one weekend a visitor could hear Frontiers on the Islamic worldview, Jews for Jesus on Jewish outreach, the Slavic Gospel Association on partnering with believers in the Commonwealth of Independent States, International Justice Mission on advocacy for the afflicted, Wycliffe Bible Translators on literacy as a driver of church growth, SIM on AIDS in Africa, Yonge Street Mission on low-income children in Toronto, and Finishers Canada on what people approaching the second half of life might do with it. Two sessions were not talks at all: Christar ran a role play called "I Am Ahmet", twice in one day, and SIM ran an African village simulation.

The programme also ran in three languages. 5 sessions were held in Cantonese and 3 in Mandarin, most of them presented by the Chinese Ministerial, and their subjects are specific to that audience rather than translated from the English track: reaching Mandarin-speaking newcomers, Chinese Christians reaching non-Chinese, mobilising Canadian-born Chinese into mission, and one titled "How I Let My Children Go". That is a parallel conference running inside the conference, and none of the organisation's own descriptions of its programme mentions it.

Two further things are visible only in the grid itself. 7 slots belonged to a separate youth seminar track, and 5 slots went to print with no presenter named at all — the schedule was published before it was finished. And 5 presenters took more than one slot across the weekend, among them Craig Bauman, Marty Frisk, Ron Pearce, which is what a programme of this size looks like when it is filled by the organisations exhibiting in the hall rather than by invited speakers.

Master Seminars, and the name that outlived them

5 of the 2003 sessions were billed as Master Seminars, a tier of their own carrying the weekend's better-known names:

• Chris Marantika — Partners Int'l Indonesia
• Anne Graham Lotz — Master Seminar , on learning to listen to god
• Joseph Stowell — Moody Bible Institute
• Thomas Wang (held in Mandarin)
• Tokunboh Adeyemo — Association of Evangelicals of Africa

By 2010 that tier had become a navigation item of its own, listed between the exhibits and the men's stream — and the page behind it carried nothing but a promise of content to follow. It is the clearest small instance of a pattern the rest of this record shows at larger scale: the structure kept its shape in the menu after the content behind it stopped being produced.

What the organisers said about it afterwards

After the 2004 conference the organisation published a short assessment of its own seminar programme, and it is unusually frank for a page written to be read by the public. Attendance was varied, it says: some seminars drew three or four people while others filled the room to overflowing. It then asks why that was, and lists what it thought needed addressing — time of day, topic, the size of the potential audience for a given subject, and how the seminars had been marketed. The same note records that the topics had ranged across the world and across audiences, and thanks the volunteers who ran them.

Nothing in the record says whether those four factors were ever acted on. What can be said is that the programme kept adding tracks for another decade afterwards, which suggests the response to a thinly attended seminar was narrower targeting rather than fewer seminars.

Tracks that grew out of it

Over time the seminar programme spawned named tracks. The 2003 conference added a roundtable of business executives on integrating faith and work; 2004 introduced a business track called Anointed for Business, along with the Refugee Highway and corners for the visual and performing arts; and 2007 introduced the first Arts & Media seminar track. The Moving Beyond Barriers workshops of 2012 were a six-part seminar series in the same mould, and the streams for men, women and single adults were the same idea applied to an audience instead of a subject.

The keynote platform for every year is in the speakers record, and the conferences themselves in the archive.