Catholic nonprofit, grad school to leave Denver for St. Louis Boeing retreat center

The Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school and publishing company founded in Denver in 2005, announced this week it's relocating to St. Louis.

Over the next several years, the religious nonprofit will phase operations to its new headquarters: the former Boeing Leadership Center — a 284-acre compound used by the aircraft and aerospace company for corporate retreats before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The institute bought the property in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, Missouri, for $19 million in an all-cash transaction made possible by anonymous donors, the organization confirmed. 

The nonprofit aims to make its new home in the St. Louis a spiritual center for U.S. Catholics as its growth was constrained by Denver’s rising costs.

“We've been very successful in Denver, Colorado … but we've really kind of maxed out the space,” Augustine Institute Director and Founder Tim Gray told the Denver Gazette.

The nonprofit was inspired by Pope John Paul II’s visit to Denver in 1993 calling for a “new evangelization” and aims to educate lay Catholics — those who aren’t priests or under religious vows — through its theology school and using online technology as church attendance continues to drop in the U.S.

The organization’s revenues have nearly doubled over five years. It made $32.5 million last year, according to its 2023 income tax filing, compared to $17.5 million in 2018.

In addition to its graduate school, the Augustine Institute runs Formed, a Catholic streaming platform with more than 1.7 million subscribers and available to more than half of the country's churches, Gray said.

Its current headquarters and campus within the Denver Tech Center is “bursting at the seams,” he said.

And it’s an especially a big problem for its graduate school, as most of its 550 students are remote, with only about 40 to 50 based in the state. It currently offers no on-campus housing, making it difficult to recruit potential students who can’t afford living in the Denver area.

“One of the pain points of Denver has been, as everybody who runs a business there knows, it's getting more and more expensive,” Gray said. “So when you're recruiting people to move and relocate to Denver, it's hard because the cost of housing is so high.”

The institute wasn't looking to leave Denver originally, but when the Archdiocese of St. Louis alerted them to the former Boeing Leadership Center site, Gray said it checked a lot of boxes and would fix their student housing problems.  

The St. Louis site will also allow the organization to hold more conferences, religious retreats and corporate events.

The first phase of the Augustine Institute’s relocation will be moving its Graduate School of Theology to St. Louis in time for the 2024 fall semester. It still plans to operate some of its publishing business in Denver until it can build a studio at the Boeing retreat center, Gray said.

A growing Denver Catholic startup incubator

With the Augustine Institute's relocation, what will happen to its 73,000-square-foot building on 6160 S. Syracuse Way in Greenwood Village?

They have no plans to sell the property and will keep a "small presence" in Denver, Gray said.

Its former home will become more of a Catholic business incubator or WeWork space, he said. 

The building is already home to several other Catholic startups, nonprofits and a coffee shop called Tolle Lege, a Latin phrase meaning “Take up and Read” — a phrase that led to famous theologian and philosopher St. Augustine’s conversion.

“You have all these young Catholic entrepreneurs who are there and think about how they can impact and bring the church into the 21st century and renew it,” Gray said. “We want to keep that building for that ecosystem that has really grown and become dynamic.”

Other organizations include a corporate business practice coaching program for pastors Amazing Parish, a feminine-theology resource group Endow, media company Real Life Catholic led by popular speaker and author Chris Stefanick and The Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado, a charity which a Washington Post investigation found was one of the donors of a controversial Catholic nonprofit that paid millions for data of priests using gay hookups apps.

When the Augustine Institute leaves behind its space, the director said there’s already a waitlist of six to eight more organizations led by Catholic entrepreneurs wanting a spot and some of the current tenants also expressed wanting to expand.

The Archdiocese of Denver is home to more than half-a-million Catholics and several independent religious institutions such as the Augustine Institute and the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, a national missionary organization supporting college campus ministries.

Gray said he's been asked a lot about how his organization's relocation will impact the local Catholic community, where it employs more than 100 people.

The diocese's leader, Archbishop Samuel Aquila, said in a statement that he supports the institute's move and called it a “Great Commissioning” of Denver’s Catholic influence to St. Louis – a diocese undergoing a large restructuring plan to merge or close dozens of churches.

Gray agreed with the archbishop and said that their move is a sign that Denver is an American Catholic hub meant to spread the faith elsewhere.

“Just as the Church was founded in Jerusalem and expanded to the whole world,” Gray said at the time of the announcement, “Denver is our Jerusalem.”

And soon, like the church it teaches about, the Augustine Institute will not be headquartered in its birthplace.

Instead, it'll be in a city coincidentally nicknamed “Rome of the West.”