Fifty Years of the Biblical Tabernacle Experience

On Easter Sunday 1948, Baptist pastor Hart Baldwin of St. Petersburg, Florida greeted a group of visitors beneath the columns of “Moses’ Tabernacle in the Wilderness.” The product of a careful five-year building project, the tabernacle was a full-scale replica of the one described in Exodus 25–31. Wearing a 20-pound robe, Baldwin invited the crowd to consider the significance of the tabernacle in the wilderness, both to ancient Israel and to people of faith today.

Baldwin himself had led the construction process, and guided thousands of visitors through the tabernacle until his death in 1955. Baldwin’s leadership in the project, and his deep passion for the scripture behind it raised a question—who could carry on the tabernacle’s ministry after him? 

Two postcards from the original tabernacle location in St. Petersburg, Florida.

First Mennonite Church of St. Petersburg answered. The congregation purchased the tabernacle in 1959, and Mennonite hosts led tours for another decade. When Chester Wenger, a representative of the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions (now Eastern Mennonite Missions, or EMM), met with two of these hosts—Paul and Mary Zehr—the three decided that they had another opportunity to bring the tabernacle to a new audience.

Lancaster County, the home of EMM, had recently seen an uptick in visitors to the area, in part because of a musical debut on Broadway. “Plain and Fancy” told the tale of a New York City couple who travel to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania and predictably, as musicals go, get whimsically intertwined with the lives and drama of the local Amish community. 

Realistic or not, this depiction of Bird-in-Hand had a quick impact on its very real counterpart. Curious visitors streamed to Lancaster County to get a glimpse of Amish and Mennonite ways of life. In response, EMM opened the Mennonite Information Center (now called the Visitors Center) as a resource for visitors with questions about their first interactions with Anabaptists. The natural pull of the Visitors Center to Lancaster County’s guests provided the enthusiastic new audience EMM and the Zehrs hoped to find for the tabernacle.

EMM purchased the tabernacle in 1970 and moved the structure to join the Visitors Center at its current location on Millstream Road. The refurbished tabernacle opened on May 5, 1975.

Lancaster County continues to draw in visitors, and over the past five decades, roughly 1.3 million guests from around the world have stopped in at the Mennonite Life Visitors Center to tour the Biblical Tabernacle Experience. While it has grown and developed—now a multimedia experience available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, with Korean to come later this year—the mission of the Biblical Tabernacle Experience to tell the story of journeying with God has stayed the same.