During several visits in the late 1940s until the conclusion of the
Chinese Civil War in 1950, Robert Pierce worked with the
Youth for Christ, in a series of evangelical rallies held in China and witnessed the wartime destruction of hospitals, schools, and churches. On one trip, he met Tena Hoelkeboer, a missionary teacher, who presented him with a battered and abandoned child. Unable to care for the child herself, Tena asked Pierce, "What are you going to do about her?" Pierce gave the woman his last five dollars and agreed to send the same amount each month to help the woman care for the child. He was deeply aroused by the wartime poverty and human suffering that he witnessed in both China and Korea and in 1950 he founded
World Vision International, at least partly due to his associations with local pastors such as Korean Presbyterian minister Kyung-Chik Han. In 1959 journalist
Richard Gehman wrote that "[Pierce] cannot conceal his true emotions. He seems to me to be one of the few naturally, uncontrollably honest men I have ever met." Pastor
Richard Halverson wrote that Pierce "prayed more earnestly and importunately than anyone else I have ever known. It was as though prayer burned within him. … Bob Pierce functioned from a broken heart." Pierce was also a filmmaker and during his leadership World Vision used movies, shown mainly for church audiences, as the main marketing tool. Since in the worldview of Pierce Christianity was the only religion able to counter communism, these movies were full of anti-communist cold war rhetoric and promoted Christian missionizing as a way to counter communism. With the extensive use of movies as funding tool, Bob Pierce's World Vision had together with the
Salvation Army a leading role in the development of the evangelical social action movie. Pierce was a close friend to
Abraham Vereide. Like other leading figures of World Vision, e.g. Richard Halverson, Senator
Frank Carlson, or later Winston Weaver he was also involved in
The Fellowship and the associated prayer breakfast movement founded by Vereide for which he worked during the 1950s as a field representative. In 1967 he resigned from World Vision. In 1970, he founded the hunger relief organization that became the
evangelical Christian organization
Samaritan's Purse that was modeled after the early World Vision International. ==Illness and death==