I will never forget flying to the Amazon jungle with Barry Conner in 1997. 

We had flown past the Andes as the sun came up. The week before, Barry had called. "Seth, I'm going to Iquitos in a week and I think you ought to come." I never needed much convincing. So there we were, two guys from Gainesville, Georgia, stepping off a plane, not knowing what would happen next.

A man named Freddy met us at on the tarmac. He said, “We are two hours late.” 

"For what?" We asked. 

"For the coliseum," he said. "There are 10,000 people waiting for you."

Barry and I looked at each other. After a short ride, we followed Freddy through a tunnel and into a stadium packed with people who had come to find out how they could own their own homes. It was hot and the announcer had them excited. Cameras were flashing. It felt like we were walking out with Elvis Presley.

That was Barry. He had a way of stepping into rooms that were already in motion. He just showed up, and somehow the moment would arrange itself around him.

He Saw the World as It Could Be, Not Just as It Was

I met Barry in 1994 at a small dinner party. We were moving from Florida to Gainesville. By the end of the evening he’d offered to build our home at cost. Months later, his company did so. Over the next 32 years, he became the one person who loved ideas as much as I did. He cared deeply about helping people. We would talk for hours about how to advance the kingdom of God around the world. We traveled together to countries like Costa Rica, India, Mexico, Peru, and El Salvador. 

The El Salvador trip is the one we laughed about the most. Years earlier we had spent a day at a hotel talking about a dream he called Christworld. And El Salvador was as good a place as any to build it. Christworld was going to be a self-sustaining city built around a group of ministries near its center where the poor had housing and the community had a functioning judicial system. Education from kindergarten through university would be excellent. 

Barry called me one afternoon and said, "Let’s go to El Salvador - can you be at the airport in an hour?" I was sitting with my friend Steve Wallace. I looked at Steve. He shrugged. So I threw some clothes in a bag and drove the seventeen minutes to the Gainesville airport. 

Three hours later we were touching down at the San Salvador airstrip that Oliver North had used during the Iran-Contra affair. The next morning we met President Francisco Flores and his chief of staff, Juan Jose Daboub. We spent the day with the President in his helicopter looking for land.

Barry was an incredible entrepreneur, building over 40,000 homes through his company America’s Home Place. He believed that Christworld was not a utopian fantasy but a sustainable model, something the early church had known before Constantine's architects stripped it out. He had first received the vision in 1987 while traveling through Greece, looking at the ruins of the ancient city-states. He said, “God gives me videos in my mind showing me how it’s to be built.”

So that day we flew all over El Salvador in the President's helicopter, looking at land. We found 30,000 acres near the international airport. Barry had a plan to fund the purchase. It was all in motion.

That evening, we sat down to dinner at Daboub's home for President Flores' birthday party. There were maybe fifteen people there: the owner of the nation's largest newspaper, the head of the notorious right-wing political party, and a few others who held the country in their hands. I was seated next to the political party leader and thinking about how this was the group of people who helped make the Iran/Contra affair happen. Struck by how small the circle was, I leaned over to Barry and said, "What a funny little country this is."

The party leader overheard me. He looked me in the eye, his tone menacing. "America," he said, "is a funny big country."

I apologized profusely. Barry nearly came undone trying not to laugh. 

Years later he would tell that story and inevitably get laughter from his listeners.

The Man Who Called Himself an Inventor

Barry had a constant flow of ideas and inventions running through his head. Nearly 20 years ago, I sat down with him and took notes. The list alone ran to nine major ideas: a chimney turbine that could solve the world's energy problems; an accounting system that was so revolutionary, the rest of the homebuilding market adopted it, a stadium design for double the capacity in the same footprint; a checkout system that would make cashiers unnecessary; a Lima oceanfront development that reclaimed ocean land and ran it up to the cliffs; 100,000 homes in Iquitos alone at $78 a month so the poor of the Amazon could own something. He had run the numbers on all of them.

Barry used to say, when pressed about why he was still running America's Home Place instead of devoting himself to his ideas, that he needed to fix AHP first. "We need to move it from a sales-driven company to a value-driven one," he said. "Back to our roots." 

He believed that building quality affordable homes for working families in the southeast was a moral act. It was not separate from his calling; it was part of it.

But I knew he was carrying so much more. He called the church's abdication of its responsibility to the poor the central moral failure of modern Christianity. He called it, specifically, "the sin of ignorance." He believed the cure was not a program or a movement but a building, a city, a place where the body of Christ was re-membered at the center of public life.

We traveled to Toronto together on his jet once, working through the ChristWorld concept. On the flight up, he challenged me to name twenty churches I would plant before we landed. I did it. That was what a conversation with Barry looked like. By the time the wheels touched down, you had committed to things you had not known you believed.

Wherever we traveled together, our conversations seemed intense that way. I remember a trip to Costa Rica - we were driving first to the top of the Poas volcano and then to Jaco beach. All the way to the top of the cloud-covered volcano, we were deep into a talk about libertarian economics. Usually when this happened, we were oblivious to the world around us. When we finally arrived and stepped out into the thick mist, Barry looked around, not recognizing anything and said, “So, where is the beach?” 

"I Only Wish the Church Believed as Strongly in Discipleship as the Enemy"

Barry was not a man who separated his faith from his analysis. He wrote to me once in the middle of a thread about the church's silence on hard issues: "I only wish the church believed as strongly in discipleship as the enemy."

One sentence. No hedging. That was the prophetic Barry, the one who saw clearly and could not stop himself from saying what he saw. He grieved the church's retreat from its proper role. He put his money behind trying to reverse it. He worked with Hernando de Soto in Peru, funding the training of indigenous Amazonian communities in property rights and the economics of freedom. 

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, Barry was connecting doctors and shipping-container clinics within days, threading people together before most organizations had convened their first conference call. When COVID came, he called me about ivermectin. Our friends in Iquitos had used it and the city was Covid-free. He wanted to know what we could do for AIM teams in the field. He was not panicking. He was working.

And then there was the Global Entry program. After 9/11, the security lines at the airport were impossibly long. Barry and I talked about how it could be fixed. I had an idea: “Think about securing a loan at a bank. It’s all about proving who you are in advance. What if, instead of emptying your pockets and getting frisked, you applied to a program in advance where you proved your identity?”

“What a great idea,” Barry said. “We could develop it, but you could never make money on it. The government would have to run it. Hang on - I know a guy in a Washington think tank who could take this idea and get it to congress right away. How about if I call him?”

Which is what he did. The rest is history. Now, every time I go through Global Entry, I think of that conversation and how quickly it became reality because of Barry’s penchant for action.

If Only We Were at the Alhambra

Barry understood the importance of prayer, recruiting people to pray for him as he traveled. He loved beauty. He championed the music of the Venezuelan youth orchestra. I remember he was listening to Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra on cassette tape in 2010, hoping to get to Spain, sending me YouTube links of Spanish guitar performances at odd hours.

I wrote back once calling one of the performances "magical," mentioning I thought it might have been recorded at the Alhambra. Barry wrote back: "If only we were at the Al-Hambra taking it in!"

That was what made our friendship special - the wish to be present together, not just exchanging links across the internet but actually there, in the sound of something beautiful. Barry was a man who kept leaning toward beauty even as he worked toward justice. He saw them as intertwined, not in conflict.

We never made it to the Alhambra together. I think about that, but I know the best is yet to come.

Barry Conner loved Jesus with unusual clarity. He loved the poor the way you love someone you have looked in the eye. He would go into the world’s slums and talk to the poor about their lives. He loved his ideas the way stewards love what they have been given. And he loved his friends and his partners well, over long years, in ways that countless thousands are thankful for.

We talked about heaven. I told him that when we rendezvous there, God will probably have adventures of discovery waiting for us. That we will need to go explore some quasar together. I fully expect him to have an itinerary for us when I arrive!

Even toward the end, he was not finished. His idea list was still growing. I believe that now, he has the resources he was always looking for. And I imagine he is already at work.

Rest well, my friend. The ideas mattered. Your life mattered. You mattered.