Let’s face it:
99% of all talents and resources are within our church membership. Yet we are forced to work at secular jobs 40 hours a week, advancing a mission other than God’s, simply because we need to pay our bills.
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!
Uriah Smith patented a prosthetic leg.¹ Joshua Himes was the marketing genius behind the Millerite movement. J. H. Kellogg invented exercise equipment still used today and changed western breakfast with his peanut butter and cornflakes.² E. A. Sutherland & his team at Madison created 30 different products derived from soy.³ Ferdinand Stahl started a clinic and 46 missionary schools in Peru.⁴ Dr. Harry Miller established 20 hospitals throughout China.⁵ J. N. Andrews’ printing ministry evangelized Switzerland.⁶ This entrepreneurial spirit drove our pioneers and allowed the church to grow exponentially.
Visionary Ellen White had a remarkable dream about startups in San Francisco. In the 1900s it came to fruition. Adventists had dozens of ventures to help the people of San Francisco and share the Gospel with them. She called this network a “beehive.”
It’s a lie from the adversary that the only way to work full-time for God is to become a pastor. Less than 5% of the world’s population are public speakers. God needs all talents — electricians, musicians, designers, engineers, accountants — missional entrepreneurship involves everyone.
Traditional capitalism is broken. It has exploited the planet and the poor. We need a new economy, a new way of doing business. Where kindness, fairness and sustainability are the motivating factors. Where business is not about self, but about others.
One college attracted international press and disrupted entire industries. Graduates started hundreds of companies and ministries. It was Adventism’s first college of missional entrepreneurship.
Businesses and business people have a disproportionate amount of influence in society. The world’s biggest enterprises dictate society’s everyday life. It’s time to use this influence to advance God’s work. We can naturally minister to people’s needs through products and services, win their confidence and then bid them to follow Jesus.
God’s promise to His children remains true until today: “The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the Lord your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom.” Deut 28:13.
63% of young people want to start their own business.¹
Let’s give them the deepest purpose to their entrepreneurial endeavors.
The world’s biggest fast food chain opens 9 new restaurants every week.¹ The largest soft drink manufacturer has already reached 98% of the world’s population.² Twitter’s founder recently said, “The most efficient means to spread an idea today is a corporate structure.” While secular businesses have been successfully preaching their idea of happiness, we are called to use business for noble ends.
Missional businesses are permanent centers of evangelistic influence — seven days a week, all year long. Not sporadic evangelistic efforts on Sabbath afternoon once in a while.
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 in our DNA”
“It’s most effective”
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,…
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose of business is? Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 that the only purpose of business is to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders.
When we look back in American history, we discover that corporations and banks have certainly lived up to this selfish manifesto. Amazon and Walmart aren’t the first tax-dodging superpowers. Wells Fargo wasn’t the first bank that gambled away other people’s money.
Economist and author Martin Stoller recently published a book called Goliath, one which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” In this book, Stoller writes that Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were no less greedy or shady than today’s multi-billion ventures. Even Louie Brandeis, the associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1913 wrote an expose about profit-maximizing banks called Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It — more than 100 years ago!
Various policies and laws like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 broke certain monopolies. Yet new policies and laws came back and removed old limits, and so our economy became what is it today.
But there is hope. Customers are changing their priorities and demanding products that help our planet and other people. Corporations are redefining the purpose of business for themselves. Impact investing is on the rise. There is no better time or setting than now. Missional entrepreneurship is needed, there is demand and God’s people should be the first and best to do business in a selfless and Christ-like way.
It all started with a young farm boy called Edward A. Sutherland who later became one of Adventism’s greatest innovators. He is celebrated by many as the father of Adventist education. For many years, Ellen White had been sharing some highly innovative approaches to education that nobody seemed to be able to implement. Sutherland felt the need to go and start a new college that could fully embrace this innovative approach and showcase it to the world: Madison College, Adventism’s first college of missional entrepreneurship…
