“What Makes a Visionary? The Story of a Good Idea.”

Look, and you will see there are a lot of good ideas floating around like effervescing light bulbs in the night sky. Above the heads, especially of creative persons, you might notice a lot of bright ideas. Dreamers and inventors imagine more things in one day than can ever become reality. But a visionary is something quite different. A visionary is someone who can stick with an idea, develop it, and see it blossom in such a way that it makes a difference, and even changes the world. Visionaries see what COULD BE down the road ahead.

The visionary also seems to be someone who is almost burdened with the persistence of the grand idea. At least that is the case with my friend Dr Martin Price, who is the founder of ECHO, the Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization. Martin agreed to talk to me about how he lived several years with the idea of ECHO until it became a reality. I was curious how the creative process works, considering that many ideas never reach solid ground.

Although Martin is a scientist, with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, his scientific discipline did not have a central role in launching the ECHO organization. As I learned from him, it seemed to be more about his Christian faith, and how that faith played out in inspiration.

As I see it, science, in its pure from, can bring many remarkable innovations to our world. By way of research involving inductive reasoning, the scientific disciplines pursue new truths empirically. New ideas are apprehended or grasped with cognitive rigor, and carefully documented studies. A new truth comes at the end of a long line of reasoning.

But visionaries, I think, do not so much search and ultimately discover a new truth, as they are seized by a truth. They are often ordinary people with an extraordinary calling. The vision of “what could be” is received, as if from somewhere else. In Martin’s case, it was, for him, inspiration from God. He describes his spiritual journey with this developing inspiration as sometimes “tortured”. It was as if it were inscribed on his inner blueprint, whether he desired it or not. Yet he says it would qualify as an inspiration mostly in hindsight.

He came to believe that all of his skills and training should be used to help the poor. On a watershed evening nearly forty years ago, he was taking a walk on the campus of Geneva College when it occurred to him “What are the prayers of a poor farmer living (in another country) with his family in some impoverished situation?” When he imagined what those prayerful needs were, he felt a calling to employ his scientific knowledge to help the desperately poor. It was not a clarion call exactly, because there were doubts along the way, and much to be sorted out for his vocational plans. But one thing that did sustain him was a photo torn from a magazine of a nurse holding a malnourished baby. He kept the photo posted in his office, as a kind of sustaining symbolic image of his ongoing and persistent “vision”.

The vision, as I am calling it, stayed with him. And without clear knowledge of which direction he was to go, he took some risks with his career. Martin says it seemed right to proceed without certainty of where the project was going, “because you can’t see the success at the beginning”. It only gradually became clear to him that he could fill a gap in the technical preparation of agricultural missionaries. The global problem was food scarcity among small farmers in developing countries. The structure of a solution was to provide resources for just these people who needed it the most.

 Instead of supplying food directly to the hungry, trained missionaries, Peace Corps workers, and community development workers could teach the hungry and nutritionally deficient people how to increase food production right where they lived. Along with technical assistance, providing seeds (free) of nutritious plants was the aim. Many of the plants that could help feed a family were discovered in one country, but unknown in another country where the growing conditions were similar. The spirit of experimentation proved to be an essential quality for putting the visionary ideas into practice. This meant that agricultural scientists who wanted to share practical ideas could be brought together with each other and those who, with practical education, would branch out to share their knowledge. And ultimately, a network of farmer to farmer.

As simple as this sounds in the twenty-first century, I see this as part of the historical shift in the concept of global agricultural mission work. The desire of missionaries to spread the Gospel became directly linked to a knowledgeable and practical way to feed the poor and hungry, a Biblical injunction. Within missionary theology, there seems to have been a shift from a focus on the next world to a focus on the quality of life in this world. And it suggests viewing a person’s soul wholistically, rather than as a separate entity apart from the material body.

  ECHO’s education and training program now serves 160, mostly equatorial, countries where food production is challenging for a variety of reasons. Through its four satellite centers around the globe, the work continues to expand.

What makes a visionary would seem to be a combination of good reasoning as well as inspiration. With Martin as an example, it would seem that some sort of open-minded receptivity was required. My theory is that good inspirations come from a common source of constructive Creativity, a kind of Muse. Perhaps it could even be termed, the “mind of God”. Karl Jung calls this the Collective Unconscious. Such things as medical advances, technological advances, and artistic creations, that no one else had thought of before, flow from this realm. If you could imagine that civilization has progressed from the first wheel to space flight, and from tribal cultures to rule of law, then you might also imagine that there are yet more benefits to emerge, through visionaries, to this world we live in.

I asked Martin if he had any new visions for future development. He thought it might be less an impact than ECHO’s global mission, but he would like to do more to introduce newcomers to Florida to a 12-month food gardening season. As a good idea, it could, he suggested, be shared with anyone in the world.