By God and Good Luck
How a mission trip organization was able to make the move from the East coast to the Midwest
The story of how World Servants, a short-term mission trip organization was able to make the move from West Palm Beach, Florida to the Twin Cities, Minnesota. This is an excerpt from an interview with one of the staff who worked in the organization for 25 years.
We started looking in ’95 for something more central. We were working with people in California, Washington, Midwest and east. West Palm Beach isn’t a great place for a mission organization. It’s very transient. During the off-season, it’s about 600,000 people. During the vacation season, snowbird season they call it, it goes up to 1.2 million, so it doubles. And so people are moving in and out all of the time, and it’s far on the east and not at a major airport. So we were looking for a place more centrally located and near a major airport. We had six sites. We looked at Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas, Texas.
So we had a team of people; four people that were doing exploring. I wasn’t even on that team. I didn’t want to sway where we went. I wanted this to be more of a staff decision. However, I came up here [to Minnesota] to speak at a conference, and the guy who was a pastor of this church at that time was an old friend of mine at Bethel College; we’d been to college together. So we were having lunch together and he was asking how I’m doing and what I’m doing, and I was telling him about what’s going on with World Servants and that we had a team looking for a new place to have our central office, and he said, “Well, why don’t you have it here?”
“Well, Twin Cities is one of the areas we’re looking at-”
“No, no, I mean right here at this church.”
I said, “Well, what do you mean?”
“Well, we have this space that nobody uses. It just sits there. It’s vacant. Hasn’t been used for several years.” And he said, “I’ve been really trying to get the church into missions, so what if we consider giving you a ten year free rent and in exchange for helping our church get involved in missions?”
I thought, “That’s interesting.” So I went back, and I shared this with the team, and they said let’s share it with the board. Well, we were paying about, I’d say, $60,000 a year for our rent in West Palm Beach. So you share that with the board, and they say, “Oh, well, 10 years times 60,000 that’s a $600,000 gift [pause] Why are we thinking about someplace else? [laughs] It was on our list!”
So-it’s interesting how God works. The chairman of the board and I were supposed to come up [to Minnesota] for a meeting between the board and the session of this particular church. And so, we’re supposed to come up, and the chairman of the board at that time for World Servants was a federal judge, and he got called into a case, so he couldn’t come. So I didn’t know what to do, and I was trying to find who else could come with me. And there was a guy who had just come on the board, didn’t know him real well, didn’t know any of his financial background, but he said, “I could go.”
So we came and we met with the session. And we started talking about what it would take to make the move. And this would have to be redone [motions around office] this was just Sunday School rooms and tile floor, divided up in different Sunday School rooms about thirty-forty years ago when they built it. Kinda musty smelling. So we met with them, and as we were talking about it, they said they’d be willing to share half the cost of doing this into a new space if World Servants could come up with the other half. Well, as we’re talking about it we begin to realize it’s going to cost $100,000 for World Servants part of it. And so we’re pretty much saying well, this sounds like it isn’t gonna work because we don’t have $100,000.
And the board member, who was with us, is fairly quiet and at one point he says, “I could come up with $100,000.”
[pause] “What?!?!”
He said, “Yeah, I’d be willing to come up with $100,000.”
And so that really made the move possible. And again, it was one of those things that I certainly didn’t design. He wasn’t the person I’d picked to come, but it’s kinda how you see God working in these things. I don’t think anyone else on the board could’ve done that.
Thanks for reading! If you want to find out more about World Servants work in communities around the world, check us out at www.worldservants.org.
