By Josh Grimes, Lead Pastor at Common Place East
Beekeeping became my pandemic hobby. I ordered two boxes of 10,000 bees from Georgia, and suddenly I was in business.
It didn’t take me long to learn that honeybees do two things really well (three if you count stinging me). They make honey, and they make more bees. In fact, a healthy beehive will often multiply each spring and start a new hive elsewhere, a phenomenon we call “swarming.”
Last summer I checked on my bees and noticed they had built several queen cells, which are special rooms built onto the hive for the purpose of growing a new queen bee. Once the new queen emerges, the existing queen will leave the hive with enough bees to start a new hive elsewhere. Based on what I saw I knew my bees were preparing to swarm and I, as the beekeeper, had two options.
A Beekeeper’s Choice
One, I could eliminate future hive leaders by killing the baby queen bees in their cells. This forces the existing queen and hive to remain. The benefit of this is that there is greater honey production because of the strong hive population.
The second option is to work with the hive in their multiplying efforts. The beekeeper prepares a new hive box and moves the queen cells and hundreds of worker bees to a new location, along with ample food supplies to support the baby hive. You have less honey production for the next couple of months as the hives recover, however by fall you end up with two hives with the same genetic traits and double the honey flow.
I went with option two, and after a few weeks of multiplying, I investigated both hives and discovered I had two queens. By the end of the summer, I had multiplied several hives successfully, and my bee population and honey capacity had grown!
Ironically, this new hobby of mine coincided with our church planting efforts at Common Places Church, and I keep seeing remarkable correlations.
Lessons for the Church
Thirteen years ago, I replanted a church in Lock Haven in a coffee shop, and my operating instructions were simply to survive. Starting out I thought the kinds of churches that plant more churches were large congregations in urban populations, not exactly my environment in rural PA.
But over the last few years, Jesus has slowly been changing my mind. Rather than expanding our physical ministry space, Common Place decided to multiply right here in our town. In September, we launched a new church and God has already been faithful to make both congregations fruitful.
Instead of trying to manage the hive and keep it in one place, we have decided to raise new leaders who will carry on the DNA and mission of Jesus’s Church.
Sometimes I wonder if we inadvertently eliminate future leaders in the church because we are threatened they might cause a swarm. In our attempt to keep the peace and maintain the existing hive, we carefully manage the dreamers and entrepreneurs. After all, the honey is so good.
But what if we blessed them to go and start a new hive? What if we equipped them to be successful in their ministry dreams?
What if success didn’t look like giant hives producing lots of honey, but rather a rapidly multiplying network of nimble churches moving across our district in both big cities and little communities?
And what if that wasn’t primarily the job of district offices or Bible colleges, but rather the local church? Churches like mine and yours? If the honeybees teach us anything, it’s that the leaders of the next church are probably sitting in your pews each Sunday.
Help them swarm.
March 20 is Church Planting Sunday for our Alliance family. You can find resources here.