Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born

Demos Shakarayan is a California dairy farmer and the founder of the International Society of Workers for the spread of the Full Gospel.
The book offers answers:
- For those who are confused. (Read how Demos learned to distinguish God’s voice from the voice of the enemy)
- For those who make mistakes (Read how God corrects mistakes that nearly destroyed Demose’s dream of organizing fellowship among lay Christians)
- For those who need practical help (Read how God sent a buyer to a business nobody wanted when Demos put God’s work first)

The book reveals the great secret that all of us need to know. And once you learn it, as Demos writes, “no matter what happens in the world, we will be the happiest people on earth.”

Everyone in Kara Kala knew that when Efim was eleven, during one of his prayer vigils he heard God’s voice. He spent seven days and nights in prayer and saw a vision.

The appearance itself was extraordinary. Of course, as his grandfather would sometimes grumble, anyone who hadn’t eaten or slept for so long could see visions. But what Efim was doing during those seven days is not so easy to explain.

Efim couldn’t help but read and write. Sitting in his small house in Kara Kala, in the vision he saw drawings with the most beautiful handwriting. Taking a pencil and paper, he sat at a rough wooden table for seven days…

By following the movements of the Pentecostals, we visited many parts of the world, because here we found good testimonies, delight, life change, and the reality of church life in our days. And over time we noticed an interesting phenomenon. No matter who we spoke to—whose faith had been awakened—men and women, children and older people, Roman Catholics and Mennonites—all of them began their story with this unusual group of businesslike men and a dairy farmer from Doyne, California, named Demos Shakarayan.

“How could it be?” we wondered. “How can this shy, not very eloquent man with a restrained pleasant smile—who seems never to rush and who doesn’t know today what he will do tomorrow—have such influence on millions of people?”