Bob Pierce

Life

His full name was Robert Willard Pierce. He was born on October 8, 1914, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and studied at Pasadena Nazarene College. He served as a Baptist minister and is reported to have been ordained in 1940.

Around 1947, while conducting itinerant evangelism in China, he began sending five dollars a month to support a girl who had been abandoned by her parents after meeting him. This episode is often cited as the starting point of World Vision's child sponsorship ministry. In 1949 he visited Korea and held evangelistic meetings at Namdaemun Church in Seoul, reportedly at the invitation of the Rev. Kim Chi-sun. In 1950 he returned to Korea to make a film, and when the Korean War broke out, he served as a war correspondent.

He left World Vision in 1967 and founded Samaritan's Purse in 1970. He died of leukemia on September 6, 1978, in Arcadia, California.

Ministry and Achievements

• Founding of World Vision: During the war, Pierce met the Rev. Han Kyung-chik, who was caring for orphans and widows in a wartime refugee area, and the two began relief work together. This work grew into the international relief organization World Vision. The official history of World Vision Korea dates the founding of Korea Sunmyunghoe to September 1950.
• Fundraising through film: He made extensive use of on-site film footage in fundraising, helping to advance evangelical filmmaking on social action. In recognition of his work producing Christian films, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Northwestern College in Minnesota.
• Founding of Samaritan's Purse: He founded Samaritan's Purse in Hollywood, California, in 1970. Its aim was to meet urgent needs in crisis areas through existing evangelical mission agencies and local churches. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who had met Pierce in 1973, became its president in 1979, after Pierce's death.
• Prayer: After encountering suffering children on Geoje Island, Pierce is said to have written in his Bible the prayer, "Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God." This prayer is frequently quoted as expressing the spirit of both organizations.

Influence on the Korean Church

Sunmyunghoe's early work centered on supporting institutions for war orphans, such as orphanages, infant homes, and homes for blind and deaf children. In 1954 it opened a children's clinic at Dongsan Christian Hospital in Daegu, and in 1959 a special dermatology clinic for Hansen's disease patients in Seoul. In 1960 it formed the Sunmyunghoe Children's Choir (now the World Vision Korea Children's Choir) from orphans, and the choir toured abroad to raise funds. Pierce is reported to have received on three occasions the highest decoration that a Korean president can confer on a foreign national. Sunmyunghoe was renamed World Vision Korea in 1999. Today it is often cited as an example of a country that once received aid becoming one that gives aid to others.

Assessment

Pierce is regarded as a pioneer of twentieth-century evangelical relief work that united evangelism and charitable relief. At the same time, the American historian David Swartz has pointed out that American accounts have presented Pierce as the sole founder while portraying Han Kyung-chik as little more than an interpreter. Swartz argues that Han should be regarded as a co-founder of World Vision. In the same study, Swartz also argues that Pierce's ministry in Korea was intertwined with the anticommunism of Cold War–era American evangelicalism. In its official history, World Vision Korea states that Pierce founded the organization in cooperation with Han Kyung-chik and other Korean church leaders.