From Stagnation to Innovation: HYVE Wants to Reinvigorate Adventism
by Björn Karlman | 25 June 2024 |
This article marks the launch of our AdventInnovate series, where we spotlight and inspire Adventist innovators shaping our faith and community.
At just 20 years old and light years from college graduation, Swiss-born Jesse Zwiker found himself in the deep end. He had abruptly quit his Adventist theological studies at Austria’s Bogenhofen Seminary to join a group wanting to build a mission school in Honduras.
He was now stranded in the middle of that country with very little money, a team of volunteers, and the crushing news that the person who recruited him to help build a mission school was going back to university to further his studies.
Faced with the very real challenge of how to achieve financial sustainability, Zwiker needed a survival plan. “I wasn’t a good fundraiser,” Zwiker told me. He said he didn’t have a donor base and it was clear that fundraising was not going to be a sustainable model to keep the team and project afloat. The team made a survival decision to go a more entrepreneurial route.
“We ended up buying a tamarind plantation and built a fruit processing facility,” said Zwiker. He explained that they converted the tamarind fruit into concentrate which they then sold to one of the largest drink manufacturers in Honduras. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his luck thus far, the business thrived. “Many of the (tamarind) juices that were being bought in the supermarkets were made from our concentrate. And so we started generating income for the ministry that way,” remembers Zwiker.
The experience convinced Zwiker of the need to fuse ministry with entrepreneurship “to make ministries not dependent on donations, but really self-sustaining.” Encouraged by this early success, Zwiker went further: “We started playing around with all kinds of business ideas…. We started baking, we started a wellness center, and then we started selling bricks to the local community,” he said.
A key turning point came when “we hired a number of families from the community to work in our tamarind business,” said Zwiker. The ministry was able to provide jobs for them and improve their lives. “We had all these workers coming to us. So I thought, why don’t we have morning worships with them?” recalls Zwiker, describing the genesis of a thriving Adventist community in the area.
The experience profoundly impacted Zwiker. “I started seeing more missional potential through business than even through the (school) ministry,” he said. Zwiker viewed traditional ministry in a new light, pondering, “Did the worlds of business and ministry have to be entirely separate?”
Reflecting on Jesus, the son of a carpenter, his enterprising fishermen disciples, and Paul, the tentmaker, Zwiker realized, “They all had businesses and it was a sacred calling. If our ministries were more like businesses, they would sustain themselves…. We really could scale across the globe much faster, much easier.”
Little did Zwiker know where this realization would eventually lead.
A church in need of rejuvenation
You would quickly be forgiven for calling the Seventh-day Adventist Church risk-averse, top-heavy, and somewhat calcified these days. As a global entity, it has fallen victim to the pitfalls of age and size, with institutionalism hardening its administrative bodies and congregations into what many see as an out-of-touch establishment. Innovation and the boundary-breaking spirit that fueled Adventist pioneers often now seem like relics of the past, leading to a sense of stagnation repelling the young.
The sentiment was captured by G.T. Ng, executive secretary of the General Conference at a denominational leadership conference in 2021. During a breakout session at the event, Ng prefaced some of his own ideas for denominational innovation with the statement, “The Adventist Church seems to be in the recycling business. We recycle the same ideas again and again.”
Within this ossified establishment, a renegade group of disruptors is emerging – young entrepreneurial innovators breathing new life into Adventist values through sustainable, business-minded ministry models. Determined to catalyze change, Zwiker is at the helm of this movement. He’s brought together a group of Adventist entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors into an organization called Hyve.
Founded in 2017 by Zwiker and (at the time) Lufthansa airline innovation executive Marcus Witte, Hyve is a burgeoning community dedicated to “missional entrepreneurship” – the idea of sharing the gospel and its values through Christian businesses. While supportive of the Adventist Church, Hyve is not run or owned by any denominational entity.
Jared Thurmon, an Adventist entrepreneur heavily involved with Hyve, captures the impatience felt by many toward the perceived stagnation within institutionalized Adventism. “When the institution will not or cannot be innovative, it forces those in and around it to fill that role,” he explains.
“I want to be careful how I say this, but I really fell in love with a more relevant and more modern way of doing ministry,” says Zwiker as he describes how his early entrepreneurial experience in Honduras led him and Witte to create Hyve.
Zwiker sees “some traditional approaches” of ministry as “pushing the gospel on people.” Missional entrepreneurship, on the other hand, requires relevance. “In business you are forced to be relevant to your customers and community or they will simply leave.”
A legacy of Adventist innovation
Every year, Hyve runs what it calls the Hyve Creators Conference: an opportunity for Adventist entrepreneurs and investors to meet, network, and do deals. In recent years, this event has taken place at Southern Adventist University, although it started in Europe and is moving to Andrews University in 2025.
The climax of Hyve Creators is what’s called the Lion’s Den, a pitch competition resembling Shark Tank, the TV show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch to investors. The most recent Lion’s Den event at Southern on March 2, 2024, opened with projected pictures of Adventist early pioneers and a dramatic voiceover that is worth quoting in full because it shows how Hyve aims to position Adventist entrepreneurs:
“Remember who we are. We were the troublemakers, the revolutionaries, the radicals, the idealists, the unconventional, the nonconformists, the fanatics, the dreamers, the disruptors, the thinkers and doers, the reformers. Sacrifice was the name of the game. You can quote us, disagree with us, follow us, or oppose us, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore us because we change things, we bear responsibilities, we are leaders in enterprise, inventors, influencers, innovators, entrepreneurs, masters and not slaves of circumstance. We cannot be bought or sold. Our conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole. We stand for the truth though the heavens fall. We push humanity to their eternal destiny because we love people and God, and while some may think we have the spirit of opposition we see pioneering spirit, inventor spirit, entrepreneurial spirit, missionary spirit, the Holy Spirit because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Steve Jobs fans will recognize the final line, borrowed verbatim from his “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” speech, part of Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” advertising campaign.
Hyve capitalizes on this kind of go-getter adrenaline to emphasize the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that drove the Adventist pioneers. Organizers highlight how Joshua Himes employed “top-notch communication technologies and marketing strategies” for “an unprecedented media blitz” to share the Advent message with millions. Hyve points to Ellen G. White and Uriah Smith’s resourcefulness in starting the church’s first publishing house from a rented home, with Smith even using “his penknife” to trim magazine edges when they couldn’t afford a paper cutter.
Hyve portrays the Adventist pioneers not just as innovators, but as entrepreneurial visionaries driven by their mission. They showcase James White’s “financial acumen” that “saved many institutions” from bankruptcy, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s expansions and inventions such as cornflakes that “permanently changed America’s eating habits.”
In sharing these stories, Hyve’s message is clear: the pioneering spirit of early Adventist leaders was fueled by entrepreneurial thinking and resourcefulness in service of a greater mission. In Hyve’s view, these examples should inspire modern-day Adventists to draw from that same well of innovation and dedication to spread the gospel via missional entrepreneurship.
How do Hyve events work?
Hyve events aren’t just juiced-up Adventist Laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI) conventions. For starters, the crowd is far younger than the middle-aged-and-above ASI attendees, attracting participants mainly in the 20-40 age demographic. Hyve Creators is a four-day event that, for the last couple years, has been organized in partnership with Southern Adventist University’s School of Business. This year over 700 people attended Hyve Creators. Similar Hyve events take place annually in Australia, and last year one debuted in Colombia.
These events buzz with activity, featuring workshops, keynotes on all aspects of business, lots of networking opportunities, and business concept pitching.
Hyve’s signature program is “The Lion’s Den.” It requires participants to pre-submit a detailed pitch deck—that is, is a presentation summarizing their business plan. Hyve reviews submissions, selecting a limited number of the most promising ventures to participate in the final competition, which is similar to the TV show Shark Tank where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to investors.
Hyve guides finalists, helping them sharpen their pitches for maximum impact. The culmination comes when these entrepreneurs pitch their ideas directly to a panel of Adventist investors during the event. Finalists often receive funding from Lion’s Den investors with amounts ranging from a few thousand dollars to multi-million dollar checks for more established businesses that are looking to scale up operations.
Lion’s Den pitches vary wildly, with the most recent event featuring pitches for everything from a safer wheelchair, to an app with Christian audio programming for kids, to a zoo promoting creationism.
Plus and minus
The feedback from entrepreneurs that have pitched at Lion’s Den is both positive and negative.
Recalling his experience pitching at the first Hyve conference in Berlin, Germany, in 2017, award-winning Filipino social entrepreneur and 2022 TED Speaker Ryan Gersava told the 2024 Lion’s Den audience that what he got was “people that believed in me… at the end of the day, what you really need is people who believe in you.”
Gersava sees Hyve and the Lion’s Den event as a way to build a support system for Adventist entrepreneurs: “As an Adventist community we are here to build each other up. We are each other’s support system.”
When I spoke to Patrice Patel, a New Zealander who won first place at a Hyve pitch event in Australia and then pitched at the Hyve Creators 2024 at Southern, I got a different perspective. She was cut off when her Lion’s Den presentation at Southern exceeded the five-minute limit for pitches. She felt the subsequent five-minute question time with investors in front of a large crowd was too pressured to lend itself to a quality overview of her product. Patel’s business is a one-stop performing arts program that gets schools ready for a high-quality musical theater performance (undergirded by strong moral values) in three weeks.
Pitching at Hyve was “one of the scariest things I’ve ever done…. There are a thousand people watching you…. Even if you are just a few seconds off you get cut off, and you’ve got all these investors sitting there listening to you…. I didn’t finish and get to my punch line, which was unfortunate,” said Patel, who also leads free Christian dance and musical sessions that she offers to schools that have had a good experience with her company, Gobsmacked Productions.
I spoke to a Hyve organizer about the Lion’s Den format. “There are two things: there’s the actual show – the Lion’s Den – and then there are the actual behind-closed-doors meetings with investors that the startups can take part in…. The Lion’s Den is more to generate excitement, to provide encouragement for the audience…. It’s more of a showcase of what they’ve done, and unfortunately there are time constraints. Otherwise we are going to be there all day and no one’s gonna come,” said Glenn Grakov, a sophomore Finance major whose Southern-based BringIt student entrepreneurship organization helped organize the Hyve event this year.
Students from several Adventist colleges attend Hyve alongside seasoned entrepreneurs, and Thurmon pointed out that leaders from the denomination’s Middle East and North Africa field also attend, as they find that Christian-owned businesses are often one of the few options for having an Adventist presence in their fields, as more traditional Christian outreach is often illegal. The latest Hyve event included a delegation from Middle East University, an Adventist college based in Beirut, Lebanon.
What does the GC think of Hyve?
How does the General Conference (GC) administrative headquarters of the Adventist Church feel about Hyve, and why aren’t they leading the charge on missionary entrepreneurship and innovation? I went to Sam Neves, GC Associate Director of Communication, to get his view.
“Traditionally, the GC has been incapable of any innovation because that’s not why it exists,” said Neves. “When we created the General Conference, we never said, ‘GC, you need to be innovative.’”
Neves says that while the Adventist pioneers were innovators, they weren’t being led by the General Conference.
“Uriah Smith did not file those patents on behalf of the church,” said Neves, speaking of a series of patents by the Adventist pioneer and serial inventor. “Innovation happened on the ground.” He contrasts this with the role of the General Conference, which is “an administrative body that helps the church move forward.”
So what’s the relationship between Hyve and the General Conference? There isn’t one officially. That said, GC officials, including Neves, have started attending Hyve events.
“While Hyve collaborates with church entities and institutions globally, Hyve maintains autonomy in its operations,” said Thurmon. He describes the relationship with denominational leadership as friendly, but not controlling. This balance allows Hyve to navigate diverse cultural contexts effectively, tailoring its approach to meet the unique needs of each region.
Neves backs up: “The relationship the GC has with Hyve is what we have with every other ministry. Are you trying to advance the mission of the church or not? The closer you are to the advancement of the mission of the church, the more support you will get.”
Hasn’t this been done before?
There have been other Adventist attempts to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation among younger Adventists. One of the most prominent was Fruition Lab, which organized a succession of popular conferences for Adventist entrepreneurs in the 2010s. There was also CoLab, an organization that sought to inspire Adventist entrepreneurship, particularly on US-based Adventist college campuses. While both generated some enthusiasm, they are no longer operational.
Thurmon sees Fruition Lab, led during its years of operation by business strategist Jeff Tatarchuk, as having been a necessary precursor to Hyve. “Fruition Lab was a huge pioneer,” said Thurmon, saying Tatarchuk “disrupted everyone…. Without Fruition Lab there would be no Hyve.”
Thurmon says that Fruition Lab assumed that those taking part were already interested in Adventist mission, and that therefore its events were focused on providing business training, while an organization like ASI assumes proficiency in business and is more interested in equipping business person members to share their Adventist faith.
Hyve, says Thurmon, tries to finely balance both business and Adventist mission.
Thurmon sees a migration of young people to Hyve for a number of reasons. One is that Hyve is very proactive about targeting young business people and students. “I think Hyve has been pretty intentional about staging younger entrepreneurs (in their events),” said Thurmon.
Also, Thurmon says Hyve is enjoying exceptional momentum because Zwiker has been a strategic bridge builder from the start, crafting supporting relationships for the organization. Zwiker has managed to work collaboratively with denominational leaders and Adventist college campuses, winning endorsements and low-cost venues for Hyve events.
Hyve investor and serial inventor, Daryl Gungadoo elaborates on Zwiker’s bridge building by saying Zwiker deliberately framed Hyve in a way that had broad Adventist appeal, especially as Hyve stresses the importance of continuing a lineage of Adventist innovation stretching back to the aforementioned pioneers.
Hyve “basically says, hey, we come from a lineage of innovators here. And let’s not stop there,” said Gungadoo.
He said that what distinguishes Hyve and helps ensure its success is the concept of marrying business savvy and ethics while being “very biblically grounded and being unashamed of that.”
No fear of profit
“They’re not scared of profit,” says Neves, explaining what makes Hyve attractive to young entrepreneurs. He says that young Adventists do not subscribe to the compartmentalization of older generations that often see the need to keep religion and business separate.
“They’re interested in their profit and mission and spirituality and all of it being one thing,” said Neves, “They’re looking for integration not balance…. Older generations are looking for balance between the different things they do. Younger generations are looking for integration of everything they do.”
Thurmon echoes this view, stressing that Hyve’s success will be born out by Adventist entrepreneurs “in the trenches” bringing a blessing to their communities through their business rather than previous models where Adventist businesses thought more about making money in business that they could then separately give to mission efforts.
Will this last?
“There’s a reason prophets have never been on the payroll,” said Thurmon as he spoke of the role Hyve has to play in the Adventist community and beyond. “I do believe there is a prophetic role for people to do things that large organizations cannot or will not.”
Thurmon believes Hyve has a responsibility to harness and encourage missional entrepreneurship across the denomination and to grow in usefulness to entrepreneurs that attend Hyve events.
“Both the Adventist Church and Hyve will be irrelevant in 10 years unless we begin to engage with the world, I don’t see this idea of conferences for ourselves, by ourselves, having a long future,” says Thurmon, underscoring the need to stay relevant to the business community and to teach entrepreneurs to truly cater to their customers’ needs.
“‘Entrepreneurship is the hottest thing. It’s skyrocketing. So we’re riding that wave,'” says Zwiker as I approach him about the future of the organization he co-founded. However, he quickly adds, “at the same time, what we’re doing to integrate faith and business is not an easy thing.” He acknowledges that there are lots of critics who feel business and mission should not mix.
“We get so much push back that you know, I get tempted to just close shop,” Zwiker admits. But he is determined to stay the course. “I’m committed to making this happen,” Zwiker insists. “There’s nothing that can tell me to stop, I really feel like it’s a calling and I’m going to be doing this probably for the next few decades. I’m not going away.”
“Profit can always overshadow mission. But it doesn’t need to! It’s all about the motivation. Profit, when used rightly, can greatly expand the kingdom of God. Entrepreneurship can be a vehicle to spread the gospel, meet people’s needs, further human flourishing, and show God’s love in the marketplace,” says Michelle Doucoumes, former Associate Professor of Business at Southern, when I asked her how she felt about the tension between profit and mission that upsets some Adventist critics of Hyve. Doucoumes was the faculty sponsor of the BringIt group of Southern students that helped organize the 2024 Hyve Creators event.
Patel is appreciative of what Hyve has done for her: “I just think it’s amazing that Jesse (Zwiker) has created a platform for entrepreneurs to be able to pitch about how they do outreach through their companies and through their businesses, and it’s an actual voice for us to be able to voice how we do things differently…. I think it’s really awesome in that way, it’s great for publicity to get what you do out there… and for me, Hyve opened up the doorway to so many things.”
Prophetic vision
Zwiker often cites these quotes from Ellen White:
Religion and business are not two separate things; they are one. Bible religion is to be interwoven with all we do or say. Divine and human agencies are to combine in temporal as well as in spiritual achievements. They are to be united in all human pursuits, in mechanical and agricultural labors, in mercantile and scientific enterprises. There must be co-operation in everything embraced in Christian activity. (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 249)
You have felt that business is business, religion is religion, but I tell you that these cannot be divorced. If you seek God with the whole heart, He will be found of you; but, said Christ, “Without Me ye can do nothing.” You are not to put asunder that which God has joined—business and religion. (19 Manuscript Releases 171.1)
This kind of integration of business and religion is something Zwiker appears to never tire of promoting. Zwiker believes Hyve has a special calling, even a prophetic one.
He references a specific vision Ellen White had in the 1870s, of a network or beehive of innovative businesses emerging in San Francisco focused on natural health, vegetarian cuisine, and solving societal issues through practical compassion. Decades later, Adventist members made this a reality by establishing vegetarian restaurants, healthcare facilities, schools, and centers that served the poor and immigrants. Their acts of kindness generated great interest, allowing the Adventist message to spread widely in the area.
This collaborative “beehive” model utilized members’ entrepreneurial talents for ministry and social impact. For Zwiker the model also inspired the name Hyve—albeit not its edgy spelling.
“I can totally see a country-based chapter of Hyve,” said Gungadoo, reflecting on the future of Hyve. “Each country might have an event.” Zwiker goes even further, saying his goal is to have a Hyve chapter in every city worldwide. He says he won’t stop until he’s succeeded.
Only time will tell if these visions themselves prove prophetic.
Björn Karlman is the Executive Director of Adventist Today.
