Robert Pierce

Robert Willard "Bob" Pierce (born October 8, 1914 in Fort Dodge , Iowa , USA ; † September 6, 1978 in Arcadia , California , USA) was an American clergyman . As such, he was the founder of the aid organizations World Vision and Samaritan's Purse, as well as pastor of the Church of the Nazarene . Previously, he served as an evangelist in China and Korea for Youth for Christ , where he held the position of Vice President. As part of these functions, he also published journalistic reports in the member magazines of these organizations and worked as a filmmaker.

Life

Pierce was enrolled at Pasadena Nazarene College, but left college in 1937 and went on to work as a traveling evangelist in California . In 1940 he was ordained as a pastor at a small Baptist church. He later stated that his spiritual roots were more in Methodism . In 1943 he joined the organization Youth for Christ, for which he worked as a traveling evangelist from 1947.

His work for Youth for Christ took him to China in 1947, where he organized mass missionary events. After this beginning in China he made further trips in Asia in the function of a Missionary Ambassador-at-Large for Youth for Christ. In 1950, after a major missionary campaign in Korea, Pierce founded the mission and aid organization World Vision in response to the situation there, especially the beginning of the Korean War . After the outbreak of the Korean War, he was accredited as a war correspondent in order to ensure his continued stay in Korea and to be able to preach to soldiers.

Bob Pierce was also active as a filmmaker and during his presidency World Vision mainly used films that were geared towards an evangelically oriented church audiences as advertising media to raise funds. Since in Pierce's worldview only the Christian religion was immune to communism, these films were full of anti-communist Cold War rhetoric and promoted Christian proselytizing as a means to counter communism. Especially films like "The Red Plague" or "The Poison of Communism" radicalized the originally rather apolitical evangelical audience, which is why the films of World Vision were classified as propaganda films by the communication scientist JR Hamilton. Bob Pierce's World Vision contributed significantly to the development of the genre of "evangelical social action movies" alongside the Salvation Army .

Pierce had close relationships with Abraham Vereide , the founder of the evangelical network The Family for whose organization “International Christian Leadership” he was active in the 1950s as a “field representative” (English, for example: representative). to cease weekly radio broadcasts for financial reasons. A few months later he was on sick leave. In 1967, Bob Pierce stepped down from the leadership role of World Vision and soon after resigned from his life's work. In addition to health and family problems, the main reasons were internal disagreements about the further course of World Vision. The actual trigger was a series of arguments with the "Board" of World Vision about the runaway costs of its film productions, which threatened to ruin World Vision's finances. He later founded a new organization called Samaritan's Purse .

Pierce died of leukemia in 1978 .

criticism

Shortly after Pierce's death, Marilee Pierce Dunker, one of his daughters, began writing a book about him and his wife called Man of Vision, Woman of Prayer . This includes both his wonderful overseas experiences and his darker sides, which were particularly evident in overestimating himself and the resulting neglect of his wife and children.

The American writer Barbara Kingsolver wrote in 1998 the novel The Poisonwood Bible (German: Die Giftholzbibel , 2000) about Bob Pierce from the perspective of his daughter. In the novel, his name was Nathan Price and he was a missionary in the Congo. Due to a lack of cultural empathy, he generated many misunderstandings in communication with the local population; this also applied to his Bible, which they translated negatively as the poison wood Bible. In his misunderstood zeal, he even risked his family's life in order to continue his preaching ministry until he died lonely from illness.

Individual evidence

1. ^ J. Gordon Melton: World Vision . In: Encyclopedia of World Religions . Encyclopedia of Protestantism, No. 6 . Facts of File, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-8160-5456-5 , pp. 587 (English, It was founded in 1950 by Robert "Bob" W. Pierce (1914-78), a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, in response to the plight of children orphaned by the Korean War.).
2. ↑ Biography of Bob Pierce at the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Gary F. Vanderpol: The Least of These: American Evangelical Para Church Missions to the Poor, 1947-2005 Boston University School of Theology, 2010 (dissertation), pp 38ff (PDF, 1.6 MB)
4. ^ Bob Pierce: Lausanne in Retrospect: A Personal View. In: World Vision Magazine, December 1974.
5. ↑ JRHamilton: An Historical Study of Bob Pierce and World Vision's development of the Evangelical Social Action film. Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1980, pp. 1-8, 84, 103, 361-362
6. ^ Sharlet, Jeff: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York: HarperCollins 2008, p. 186, ISBN 978-0-06-055979-3 .
7. ↑ "Records of the Fellowship Foundation - Collection 459: Historical Background" ( Memento of the original from January 3, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the archives of the Billy Graham Center. 
8. ↑ Tim Stafford "Imperfect Instrument, World Vision's founder led a tragic and inspiring life." Christianity Today, 49, no. 3, Feb. 2005
9. ↑ cf. Bartlett, Christopher A. & Daniel F. Curran: World Vision International's AIDS Initiative: Challenging a Global Partnership, " in Harvard Business School Publishing 2005, pp. 2-4.
10. ↑ Ken Waters: "How World Vision Rose From Obscurity To Prominence: Television Fundraising 1972-1982" American Journalism, 15, No. 4, 69-93 (1998)
11. ↑ Samaritan's Purse , The Founder of Samaritan's Purse - Dr. Bob Pierce , self-presentation of the organization.
12. ↑ Peter Scazzero: The Paul principle. Why weakness can be a win. Page 51–53: Pierce as a negative example with a lack of access to his feelings and his family members