Archival record · programme record, 2004–2014

Singles

Alongside the streams for men, for women and for pastors, Mission Fest Toronto ran one for single adults. It appears in the conference's own navigation from the 2011 and 2014 programmes — and one much earlier evening survives in full.

The 2004 singles party

On the Friday of the 2004 conference the organisation ran a singles party, and the page announcing it is one of the more concrete documents in this record. It was held on 12 March 2004 at ten in the evening, in the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Bremner Boulevard — the same building the conference itself occupied that year. Admission was twenty dollars and it included a three-day pass to the conference.

That ticket is the interesting part. A social evening priced at twenty dollars that carried the whole weekend with it is not a fringe event; it is a way in. Someone who came for the party had already been given the conference, and the conference's stated purpose was to put people in a hall with a hundred mission organisations. Whether that was the intention the page does not say, but the pricing is what it is.

The audience is named precisely: single adults over thirty. Every other stream in the programme is described by who its members are rather than by age, and this is the only one in the record that draws a numeric line.

Who was on it

The music was led by Ken MacDonald and a ten-piece band, with Steve Thompson, Helena Kameka and Dianne Ticknor also performing — the page spells that last name two ways within a few lines of itself, which is the sort of detail that tends to survive in an archive when a session description does not.

The guest was Rick Heeren, described as the author of a book titled Thank God It's Monday and as a vice-president of Harvest Evangelism in Minnesota, with twenty-five years in business and ten in prayer-evangelism ministry. His part of the evening is described as putting several deliberately provocative questions to the room, aimed specifically at that age group. It is a small but clear picture of what the conference thought this audience needed: not a seminar on a mission field, but someone with a business career asking them questions about their own.

The stream, later

The evening event and the later stream are not stated anywhere to be the same programme. What the record holds is one party in 2004 and a Singles item in the navigation from 2011 onward, with nothing in between — and unlike the men's and women's streams, no co-presenting organisation is credited for it in any event report. Where those two were run in partnership with an outside body, this one appears to have been the conference's own.

The page the conference kept at this address by 2015 carried a single line asking readers to check back for the twentieth anniversary in 2016. That anniversary conference is not in the published record, and the stream does not reappear.

The parallel streams were Men On A Mission and Ordinary Women…Extraordinary Call; the wider programme is described on the seminars page. The conferences themselves are recorded in the archive.