American Bible Society announced it’s going to shutter its Faith and Liberty Discovery Center (FLDC), a Bible museum it invested greater than $60 million into, after lower than three years in operation.
ABS had projected that the museum, centrally situated on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, would draw 250,000 visitors a yr. The revenue from ticket sales for the museum show a much lower number, perhaps as little as 5,400 visitors in fiscal yr 2022 (the museum’s program revenue was $54,000 and full-priced tickets cost $10).
ABS’s latest CEO Jennifer Holloran, arriving last month to a company with quite a lot of financial and missional troubles, said in an email to staff on Wednesday that she and the board had agreed at their February meeting that “now could be the time to proceed with this difficult but needed motion.” She quoted Ecclesiastes 3, writing that “all the things that happens on this world happens on the time of God’s selecting.”
“The FLDC as conceived was a splendidly revolutionary idea,” she wrote to staff. “That idea got here with big possibilities and requirements to permit it to be functional in the long term. Unfortunately, despite the valiant efforts of our FLDC leadership and team, now we have not been in a position to achieve the long-term sustainability that an experience like that needs to achieve success.”
The museum opened in May 2021 when venues were still experiencing pandemic ripple effects, nevertheless it never rebounded like other places. CT visited the museum last month and only three visitors trickled in over a two-hour span.
ABS described FLDC as a $60 million museum when it launched in 2021, and it had $11 million in expenses in fiscal yr 2022. ABS’s 2023 stewardship report showed the organization contributed one other $9.4 million to the museum.
ABS rents the museum’s space, so it’s unlikely to recoup the investment, but this decision halts the bleeding of a few of that cash. The organization pays occupancy of about $1.3 million a yr, in response to its tax filings. ABS declined to comment on what the resolution of the lease can be.
Donors to the museum include several churches like Elevation Church and Houston’s First Baptist Church. Hobby Lobby can also be a sponsor. The Museum of the Bible, backed by the Greens who own Hobby Lobby, loaned items to the museum. Other major donors include Linda Bean of the L.L.Bean family.
“I’m disillusioned. I’m sure I’m not the just one,” said Peter Rathbun, who donated to the museum along along with his wife because he became enthusiastic about it when he served as general counsel to ABS. “I’m disillusioned because I believed it was a beautiful vision, and I don’t have any reason at this point to think that it just isn’t still a terrific vision.”
“It was a colossal waste,” said one former ABS worker who was not authorized to talk on the record.
According to multiple sources, ABS was not sending donors regular reports on the museum. ABS’s 2023 stewardship report simply thanks anyone who visited the museum.
ABS had a windfall from selling its $300 million constructing in New York in 2015 to maneuver to a rented office space in Philadelphia. The museum became one selling point of relocating to the “birthplace of America.”
“The Faith and Liberty Discovery Center would never have been possible if we’d moved to Atlanta, Orlando or Dallas. It matches perfectly in Philadelphia,” said former ABS CEO Roy Peterson in comments to DickersonBakker in 2021. Peterson oversaw the launch of FLDC.
The FLDC’s board of managers is made up of senior ABS leadership, however the museum has its own executive director.
Some former employees in interviews saw the museum initiative as one sign of ABS’s seek for an identity as a company shifting away from a few of its global work to assist Americans engage with the Bible more.
The museum’s stated goal is to trace the “relationship between faith and liberty in America … by illuminating the influence of the Bible.” The museum focuses on the Bible but doesn’t exclusively highlight Christians. Its thesis is more generic—that faith was an element of the American story—with features on figures like Jewish educator and philanthropist Rebecca Gratz.
The exhibits are largely digital, with high-quality animated videos and interactive displays developed by the same team that did the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. Historic items from ABS’s own extensive archives are on display, comparable to Helen Keller’s Bible in Braille. It also exhibits ABS’s copy of John Wesley’s “a peaceful address to our American colonies” in 1775, through which Wesley urges loyalty to the British crown.
Other organizations contributed items: Rev. Billy Graham’s notes for a sermon he gave in the previous Soviet Union in 1988 are on display, courtesy of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. And Voice of the Martyrs contributed copies of Bibles it smuggles into North Korea via weather balloon.
The exhibits are organized under themes of “faith, liberty, justice, hope, unity,” and expound on the Bible’s role in events from the founding of the United States to the forced assimilation of Native Americans to desegregation to temperance to labor reform. The museum has a team of students that draw from some Christian colleges in addition to churches.
Visitors can carry a “lamp” around and use it to the touch different exhibits to avoid wasting information they’ll access later. In the gift shop, visitors should buy a Faith and Liberty Bible published by ABS, based on its Good News Translation.
In a press release announcing the closure, Holloran stated: “We sit up for reimagining what the long run of content could appear like through a publicly accessible, digitized format.”
With the Museum of the Bible providing many items at FLDC, CT asked Robert Briggs, then-CEO of ABS, in a 2020 interview how FLDC can be distinct from the Bible museum in Washington, DC. Briggs said that the FLDC would tell a more “targeted” story about “the influence of the Bible on the event of this nation.”
The museum is about to shut to the general public on March 28.
