Let’s face it:
99% of all talents and resources are within our church membership. Yet we are often grinding away 40 hours a week at our jobs in order to pay our bills and it is often easy to forget our deeper purpose of sharing God’s love and advancing His mission.
The only way for us to do this is if we could find some way of merging our passion with our profession. This would allow us to pay our bills and do ministry full time.
…we could unlock the gigantic potential of our church membership. 24+ million Adventists, all talented, skilled and committed, working for God — 40 hours a week. How much faster would the work advance!
“Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31. Every work we do is a sacred work. We all have beautiful talents that God wants us to use. Pastors aren’t the only ones with a spiritual calling. Martin Luther emphasized that the Bible promotes the priesthood of all believers, not just the clergy. Designers, accountants, construction workers, teachers, chefs, engineers — we are priests and have the privilege of serving God and others with our talents!
This can be done in a variety of ways. Some businesses are open missional enterprises, others invest the profits into God’s work and demonstrate Christ-like kindness and care towards the people they serve.
The Adventist movement has always had a very strong missional and also entrepreneurial spirit. William Miller had a farming business. Joshua Himes had an advertising company and became the marketing genius behind the early Advent movement. Uriah Smith invented a prosthetic leg.¹ John Kellogg revolutionized the American breakfast and invented much of the gym equipment still used today.² Ferdinand Stahl started a clinic and 46 missionary schools in Peru.³ Dr. Harry Miller established 20 hospitals throughout China.⁴
Ellen White was very passionate about missional entrepreneurship and combining faith and business. She wrote: “You have felt that business is business, religion is religion, but I tell you that these cannot be divorced. (…) You are not to put asunder that which God has joined— business and religion.”¹
Entire books were compiled on certain business models, like The Health Food Ministry which calls us to have vegetarian restaurants in every city of the world. Counsels on Health and Medical Ministry focuses on health-related businesses like hospitals, sanitariums, treatment rooms and clinics. Then there is Colporteur Ministry, which talks about training students in sales and funding their tuition while doing evangelism with the books they sell.
Ellen White also wrote about how we should reach the cities by building a “beehive” network of missional ventures that would involve all church members. This self-sustainable, “all inclusive” beehive model of reaching the cities plays a prophetic role in the final outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the proclamation of the three angels’ messages.
A recent study from the University of Phoenix showed that 63% of young people below the age of 30 want to start their own businesses.¹ Many others would take a pay cut if they could only find a job that merges their passion with their profession. Missional entrepreneurship has a great future if we embrace it and provide a framework that allows our young adults to combine their missional passion with their profession.
Thousands of Adventist ministries and businesses out there are existing, but many are barely surviving. A lack of proper business development knowledge keeps them from expanding. The beehive model was meant to grow; new restaurants, food stores and treatment rooms should be opened. Ellen White wrote that we can’t be satisfied with just one single restaurant in Brooklyn! Many more should follow.
40 years before the world’s largest fast food chain opened its first doors, this visionary woman urged us to use a franchise business structure to reach the world! How did we end up neglecting this important method? How did that fast food company manage to open 40,031 restaurants¹, while we’re struggling with a few hundred? This ought not be. God called us to be the head, and not the tail. He has given us every tool and talent we need to finish His work.
A few friends shared a dream of building on this heritage and seeing missional entrepreneurship flourish around the world. They dreamed of creating a new way of doing business that would advance God’s work in the most effective way. That is how Hyve was born: Adventism’s community of missional innovators.
We are a community of entrepreneurs & innovators, seeking to inspire and empower fellow Adventists to advance God’s work through missional entrepreneurship.
To establish a ’beehive’ network of missional ventures in every city of the world.
“It’s who we are.”
“It’s scalable.”
Services and Resources
About Hyve
Around 1876, visionary Ellen White had a remarkable dream about startups in and around San Francisco which came to fruition almost three decades later.
Although that area includes today’s Silicon Valley, the nature of these ventures was very different back then. It was all about natural health care, innovative culinary cuisine and social & spiritual impact. These business owners were striving to solve the world’s most pressing problems in a sustainable way and showing to everyone in a practical way that God is love. Ellen White called this network of missional ventures a beehive.
Many church members were involved in helping the poor, caring for the sick, finding homes for orphans and jobs for the unemployed. They were running vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, treatment centers,…
