American Bible Society to close its $60 million Center City museum after 3 years

The Faith and Liberty Discovery Center says it is shutting down less than three years after opening on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

The museum created by the American Bible Society in July 2021 said it would be open to visitors until March 28. The Christian ministry nonprofit that translates Bibles and sends them around the world has recently been besieged with challenges including layoffs, funding troubles, and five CEO changes within two years.

Their latest chief executive, Jennifer Holloran, appointed in February, informed employees of the shutdown through an email sent on Wednesday, according to Christianity Today.

“Despite the valiant efforts of our FLDC leadership and team, we have not been able to achieve the long-term sustainability that an experience like that needs to be successful,” Holloran wrote, according to Christianity Today. She paraphrased Ecclesiastes 3: “Everything that happens in this world happens at the time of God’s choosing.”

The decision to close the $60 million center was agreed to by the museum’s leadership and its founders. In a statement to The Inquirer on Saturday, the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center cited the pandemic and “structural limitations” as some of the reasons for the closing. A spokesperson for the American Bible Society would not elaborate on the closing beyond that statement.

By June 2022, the museum’s total revenue after expenses went from $29.6 million to just under $4 million, according to tax documents published by ProPublica.

The American Bible Society was a New York-based organization for almost 200 years until it sold its $300 million complex to move to Philly in 2015.

At the time, former CEO Roy Peterson cited cost of living as a reason for the move.

“People can afford to live here [in Philadelphia]; it’s walkable, there’s public transportation,” Peterson told The Inquirer.

The group leased nearly 100,000 square feet across two floors at Fifth and Market Streets for 25 years and began planning to open a center on the ground floor. The rent is about $1.3 million a year, according to Christianity Today.

The expected debut date was 2016, and, at the time, Peterson referred to it as a center, not a museum.

The Faith and Liberty Discovery Center did not materialize for five more years, in a 40,000-square-foot space that Inquirer columnist Inga Saffron described as “a challenge.” By then, the center described itself as “Philadelphia’s most immersive museum” with a goal of showcasing how religious faith shaped freedom in the United States.

“We’ve created a massive digital platform, disguised as a museum,” said Pat Murdock, the center’s former executive director. “It feels like a museum — we’ve got artifacts and all that, but really it’s a digital platform that is ripe for the way people are learning today. They want to learn from the media. They want to learn from a story. And they also want to collect things, and they want to create. That’s why we created the maker space.”

Since the museum was operating in what was formerly office space, architect David Searles of JacobsWyper Architects and Local Projects, the exhibit designer behind the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, was hired to make it more inviting. Benches were included to encourage passersby to relax, and a swirling white sculpture dubbed The Beacon designed by Local Projects brought more attention to the center.

Among the exhibitions, the nonprofit had a collection of historic Bibles, including William Penn’s own, as well as video interviews of everyday people telling personal faith stories.

Despite the center acknowledging the problems of religion in American society, it had critics.

At the time of its opening, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education history at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Inquirer, “The story they’re telling is essentially a fairy tale.”

That sentiment continues to resonate on social media since the shutdown announcement, with some wondering if there is a role for such a museum in 2024, and others wishing it would have been better advertised.

The impact is yet to be fully fleshed out, with tourism officials and neighboring museums, such as the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, unaware of the shutdown until The Inquirer contacted them.

The Faith and Liberty Discovery Center told The Inquirer in a statement that Holloran, the American Bible Society’s CEO, said she looked forward to “reimagining what the future of content could look like through a publicly accessible, digitized format.”

People who have previously purchased tickets beyond March will be granted a refund.