Wycliffe Bible Translators’ constructing is 167,000 square feet of class-A office space, with windows looking over palm trees, golf course grass, and a shimmering blue lake that appears to be a near-perfect circle. The headquarters is about 10 miles from the Orlando airport within the Lake Nona area, sitting on 272 lush acres that include wetlands stuffed with Florida wildlife, an RV park, an activity center, a welcome center, corporate-quality lodging, a clinic, and more land that may very well be developed in the longer term.
And all of this may very well be yours.
From John Wycliffe Boulevard to Great Commission Way, the worldwide home base of the 82-year-old Bible translation organization is on the market. The property was listed in mid-February. Its real estate agents called it “an unrivaled opportunity for a full campus user in search of their very own headquarters throughout the metro area.”
Selling all this can be a matter of stewardship, in keeping with John Chesnut, Wycliffe’s president and CEO. The ministry doesn’t need the space and wasn’t using it to full capability.
Chesnut is just a little concerned, though, that individuals will hear that and think Wycliffe is struggling financially or has fallen on hard times, when that isn’t actually the case.
“It’s the strongest we’ve ever been in our history,” he told CT. “It’s just been an enormous season of blessing. We’re accelerating recent translations, engaging or starting with recent partners, faster than we ever have.”
In 2023, Wycliffe greenlit 523 recent Bible translation projects, he added. The ministry, which has helped translate greater than 700 languages because it was founded in 1942, currently has about 1,700 lively projects.
Public tax records show Wycliffe spends about $1 million on those projects annually. According to Chesnut, the majority of the proceeds from the sale of the property will go to fund more Bibles.
“How can we increase project funding to be able to say yes to increasingly more projects around the globe?” he said. “Focusing on vision and mission, we’ve got to have a look at all things across our budget and the way we work, and we had to have a look at this fixed asset.”
Wycliffe’s headquarters was designed for about 800 people. Wycliffe has about 3,000 staff globally, but only about 300 are within the Orlando area. And a lot of those employees don’t come into the office day by day.
Remote work was common at Wycliffe even before the COVID-19 pandemic, when all nonessential activity in Florida was restricted for 2 and a half months. Since June 2020, nevertheless, more of the staff have found they like working from home, so the constructing has remained mostly empty.
“On a high day, we’re utilizing perhaps 15 percent,” Chesnut told CT. “It’s just the brand new work rhythm.”
Numerous office employees are discovering that recent rhythm. A recent study of economic real estate found that almost 20 percent of all office space within the United States was vacant at the top of 2023. Rates are even higher within the Midwest, with 22 percent vacant in Indianapolis, 23 percent in Chicago, and above 25 percent in Columbus and Cincinnati. The rate of latest construction across the country is down greater than half.
Some of this might be attributed to changes in employment rates. The total variety of Americans with office jobs dropped last 12 months from 36 million to 35.2 million. But by far the most important change has been the rise of hybrid work and the growing acceptance of remote-first employment.
The shift could be very visible at evangelical nonprofits. Christianity Today, for instance, has increased its staff by greater than 25 percent since 2021. Currently, nevertheless, lower than half of its 86 employees live in Illinois, and only 22 live inside easy driving distance of the ministry’s longtime headquarters within the western suburbs of Chicago.
“We discovered we were perfectly able to thriving as a media ministry with a distributed team,” CT president and CEO Timothy Dalrymple said. “In fact, being distributed brought loads of benefits. It expanded our relational networks and our engagement with different regions and cultures. We were now not monolithically Midwestern. We could hire the very best people we could find, no matter location.”
CT sold its office in March. The 23,000-square-foot constructing, which has housed the magazine and other parts of the ministry since 1976—when CT relocated from Washington, DC—will develop into a veterinary hospital.
CT owned the constructing debt-free, so the sale was not motivated by financial concerns but cultural ones.
“Our old constructing served us well for many years, but it surely didn’t present a beautiful work environment for today’s team,” Dalrymple said.
CT will rent a 5,000-square-foot space on Hale Street in downtown Wheaton, Illinois, starting September 1. The recent space has an open office area, several meeting rooms, a small media studio, and a spot to host some gatherings.
Dalrymple expects 20 to 25 people to work there day after day. But for the vast majority of the staff, the foreseeable future might be distant. CT employees will communicate over Zoom and Slack and other apps, gathering in person only a number of times a 12 months.
Cultivating ministry culture is maybe the trickiest a part of selling your headquarters and going distant, in keeping with Ben Mandrell, CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources.
The Southern Baptist ministry sold its constructing in downtown Nashville in 2021. Now, it has a recent constructing within the suburb of Brentwood, which doesn’t have traditional offices but is designed as an alternative as a “teaming space,” where individuals who mostly work on their very own can come together to collaborate, create, and plan.
Lifeway staff clearly prefer this approach to office space, in keeping with Mandrell, but he personally struggled with the change.
“It was really hard for me,” he said. “I wish to see people. I wish to look of their eyes. I like walk-around management.”
Management styles should change when people aren’t all in the identical physical space, Mandrell has found. Supervisors should learn that the time that somebody is working matters rather a lot lower than the output. They should trust people to know the very best option to get their work done.
Building trust and developing team culture has develop into the primary focus of Lifeway’s twice-a-year team meetings. Initially, the leadership used the all-staff gatherings to convey information to employees—talking about recent projects, recent products, health advantages, and any changes to company policies. Now the in-person events are for celebration.
“We play loads of silly games onstage and have a good time people,” Mandrell said. “We have this huge awards ceremony at the top where we give away $2,000 and break day to twenty people per 12 months. They should stand onstage while we read stuff about them that could be very affirming, written by the people they work with. When we read their names, the entire place just erupts, and that’s develop into our form of culture.”
It has taken a number of years, nevertheless, for Lifeway to determine this recent approach to constructing camaraderie and community—and to determine what it means to work together while apart.
It has taken some time too for supporters and donors to see that this alteration will not be an indication of crisis. Some people’s first response when a ministry headquarters goes up on the market—in downtown Nashville, suburban Chicago, or the Lake Nona area of Orlando—is to assume a financial catastrophe is breaking into public view. But the leaders of those evangelical ministries say it’s just the best way the world of labor is changing. It’s an effort to be modern and inventive and to raised fulfill their mission.
“People are at all times alarmist,” Mandrell said. “I had to inform loads of people, ‘It’s not a hearth sale.’ It looks like a hearth sale on the skin. On the within, it looks like mission focus.”
