In 1947, Robert Pierce worked for a religious non-profit organization called Youth for Christ, whose mission was to evangelize the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The young evangelist held a Crusade in China, where thousands made public commitments as followers of Christ during four months of evangelistic rallies.
While there Pierce saw widespread hunger. It is said that he felt compassion for others. Pierce later wrote these words in the flyleaf of his Bible: “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.” Dragging a movie camera across Asia, Pierce showed the resulting pictures to church audiences in North America. He asked for money to help children. He showed their faces and begged Christians to “adopt” one. In 1950 he incorporated this personal crusade as World Vision, which was then a service organisation for missionaries.
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. In particular, movies like “The Red Plague” or “The Poison of Communism” radicalized originally apolitical evangelicals and the movies used by World Vision at that time can therefore also be seen as political propaganda movies. With the extensive use of movies as funding tool, Bob Pierce’s World Vision had a leading role in the development of the evangelical social action movie.