Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Learning from Ants: The Possibility of Missionary Swarms

In the last several issues, we asked how many pioneer missionary teams (forty-three thousand) were needed to serve the unreached of the world, to help find and raise up the local evangelists who can complete the task. We asked what kinds of models could recruit, train, send and support that many teams. We looked at skyscrapers (one central monolithic agency), pyramids (niche agencies) and swarms (decentralized groups). This month, we are going to look at whether a missionary swarm could be created. Can missions be a swarm? Let us put this in missionary terminology. Consider the current “buzz” about the concept of a church planting movement.

Elements of a Church Planting Movement

Every Church Planting Movement (CPM), we are told, has ten universal elements.¹ So stretch your imagination with me, and consider CPMs in the context of an ant colony:

1. Prayer. Ants don’t pray—at least as far as we know. There is perhaps one parallel. Through prayer and the leading of the Holy Spirit, evangelists are led to their “person of peace”—someone who is open to the gospel.² Ants, likewise, wander seeking their “man of peace”—a food source. (The analogy is a little loose, but the idea is that both wander randomly, instinctively, until they find the thing they are seeking, and then both summon other workers to help.)

2. Abundant gospel sowing. Ants don’t abundantly sow the gospel to make converts. However, if we are striving to make “disciple-makers,” we can think of these queens as “ant-makers.” They make hundreds of thousands of new ants each year.

3. Intentional church planting. These queens don’t just make new ants for their own hive—they make queens who can create new nests. Most ant nests will send out over four thousand females every year to start a new hive.

4. Scriptural authority. Ants don’t have a Bible. However, why is a Bible important? It is God’s word to us, and it gives us a basic standard of discipleship. It ensures that every disciple has the same basic values as every other disciple. Ants already share common values. In a sense, the instinct built into ants serves as the ant-Bible.

5. Local leadership. Ants don’t have leaders. It is one hundred percent lay leadership. They take “local leadership” to an extreme: every ant a leader, every leader an ant.

6. Lay leadership. Most CPMs are driven by lay leaders who are bi-vocational. As the movement grows, paid clergy can emerge, but it is probable that lay leadership will continue to be the main driver. Ants are similar in some ways: ant nests have a small number of queens in proportion to the larger number of workers.

7. House churches. Ants build contextualized houses. Some can be small; some can be big. They are always built from local materials—ants forage, dig, bury, drag and move dirt, leaves and wood to create the ant hill. Ant hills in a desert are not the same as ant hills in a jungle or in a city. Church planting movements emphasize house churches, but I would argue the form of the church should be contextualized to the place. In some places, buildings are more appropriate. In others, it might be better to be in a restaurant, a theater, a business or some other unusual place.

8. Churches planting churches. In CPMs, the initial church is planted by a missionary. As the movement begins to multiply, the churches themselves plant additional churches. We can see this in ant colonies: nests plant nests. Rapidly. It is instinctively what ants do.

9. Rapid reproduction. One queen ant can lay on average 1,500 eggs per day. Some colonies have one hundred or more queens, for a total of some 150,000 eggs per day. A mature colony can produce over four thousand queens in one year. When these queens are sent out to start a colony over ninety percent of them fail! Yet, despite this, an area the size of half a football (soccer) field can be home to over 100,000 queen ants. Ants dominate by the sheer rate of colony planting.

10. Healthy churches. There are not any ant-doctors and ant-psychologists; however, ants still practice member care. The queen ants and female ants are kept deep inside the mount and cared for. Worker ants labor to expand the hive, to store up food and to generally provide for the colony’s health.