He was born on October 8, 1914 in Fort Dodge, Iowa, United States, the son of Fred Asa Pierce, a carpenter, and Flora Belle Harlow Evison. The youngest of seven children, he moved with his family to Greeley, Colorado, and then, at age twelve, to Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter the family joined the Grace Church of the Nazarene, and Pierce experienced Christian conversion.
When his father died unexpectedly, Pastor Earle Mack became a major force in his life.
He attended high school in Los Angeles and then entered nearby Pasadena Nazarene College. Although he considered himself of inferior talent and was best known for his pranks, Pierce was elected student body president during his junior year.
In his early teenage years, Pierce served as a street-corner preacher. In his twenties, Pierce served as an itinerant evangelist for the Church of the Nazarene on the West Coast, as a young evangelist for the World Christian Fundamentals Association, as a general manager of the Eureka Jubilee Singers, as a fledgling filmmaker, and as an assistant minister with his father-in-law, Floyd B. Johnson, at the Los Angeles Evangelistic Center.
He was ordained by the First Baptist Church of Wilmington, California, in 1940. Pierce had found his work with young people especially fulfilling, and when he learned that the many local Youth for Christ (YFC) rallies that had developed since the late 1930's were becoming a national organization, he eagerly joined Torrey Johnson, Billy Graham, Merv Rosell, and others in the new movement.
In 1944 he accepted an invitation from the Seattle organization to lead its rally. A year later he was named a YFC vice-president at-large, which required him to return to itinerant evangelism but on a more extensive scale. When Madame Chiang Kai-shek invited Youth for Christ to conduct a series of youth rallies in China, YFC president Torrey Johnson asked Pierce to lead the effort. Although his wife was suffering from a major illness and he lacked adequate travel funds, he departed for the one-month trip in the fall of 1947. His trip resulted in nearly 18, 000 Christian conversions and proved to be a life-changing experience for Pierce.
Pierce pledged to commit funds regularly from his own limited income to help one specific needy child. Thus was born the model for what later became the expressed purpose of his World Vision organization, "To meet emergency needs in crisis areas through existing evangelical agencies and individuals. " Soon thereafter, in the midst of the Chinese Communist Revolution, Western missionaries were forced to leave China. However, with the havoc created by the Korean War, Pierce found a new mission field. He visited South Korea on the eve of the war and strongly empathized with the suffering of people who through most of the twentieth century had experienced foreign occupation.
When the Korean War began in June 1950, he gained recognition as a war correspondent for the Christian Digest, thus assuring his continued presence in South Korea. Pierce combined a willingness to share in the suffering of those to whom he ministered with an ability to persuade American Evangelicals to fund his humanitarian efforts.
He resigned in 1967. Years of constant travel and inadequate attention to diet and sleep took their toll on Pierce's mental and physical health and his relationships with his family, from whom he separated for a period. He spent his last years seeking to recover from a major neurological and psychological breakdown. He died of leukemia in Los Angeles, California, leaving as his legacy an organization that continued to grow.
Robert Willard Pierce was the founder of the international charity organization World Vision International. Due to his efforts it became the largest voluntary relief organization in the world, one of the most important centers for strategic planning for Christian mission. Pierce was also a filmmaker and during his leadership World Vision used movies, shown mainly for church audiences, as the main marketing tool. Through documentary films, radio broadcasts, and personal appearances, he helped support orphanages, child-care homes, and hospitals. Besides, he founded the hunger relief organization that became the evangelical Christian organization Samaritan's Purse.
Since in the worldview of Pierce Christianity was the only religion able to counter communism, his movies were full of anti-communist cold war rhetoric and promoted Christian missionizing as a way to counter communism.
Quotations: During the war he wrote in his Bible, "Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God. "
He had passion and natural speaking skills.
Quotes from others about the person
Evangelist Billy Graham described him as "the greatest raiser of money for missions I ever knew. "
On November 24, 1936, he married Ruth Lorraine Johnson. They had three children.
