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Vroegindewey, Book Review   117 
 

Book Review 

 

God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of 

Evangelical Humanitarianism  
By David King 

 
Reviewed by Ryan Vroegindewey 

 
 

 
 

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 

$39.95 

 

Whether or not we realize it fully, our convictions 

and patterns of behavior are profoundly shaped by 

institutions and cultural forces around us and preceding 

us. While not unique in this fact, Christians may be 

especially prone to overlook it given that we strive to 

center our worldviews on Scripture. Arguably, nowhere 

is such honest introspection more critical than in our 

engagement with the world’s most vulnerable.  

David King’s God’s Internationalists is a book fit 

for this purpose. It chronicles the origins and history of 

World Vision International, one of the world’s largest 

faith-based relief and development organizations. 

Given the significant role that World Vision has played 

in Christian, U.S., and international spheres, King 

utilizes World Vision’s story to tell a broader one about 

the critical role that global events and engagement have 

played in the formation of the post-World War II 

evangelical identity. 

King structures his book chronologically, with each 

chapter capturing a different period of growth and 

challenges in World Vision’s history. The first few 

chapters focus heavily on the story of founder Bob 

Pierce, a globe-trotting entrepreneurial evangelist. 

Pierce first created World Vision as a missionary 

organization in 1950 and set the organization on its 

trajectory of expansion and eventual professionalization 

as a major relief and development agency. As King tells 

how World Vision’s story unfolded in the following 

decades, he shows how many of the founder’s personal 

values and traits would become key organizational 

capabilities. Among these are a readiness to go to the 

frontlines of material need and adaptability and 

innovativeness in fundraising, partnerships, 

development practice, and communications.   

One primary audience for this book is scholars 

interested in the history of American evangelicalism, to 

which King contributes a novel internationalist lens.  

Another includes those interested in the under-

researched nexus of religion and the international relief 

and development system. This audience will appreciate 

King’s balanced analysis of both the strengths and 

shortcomings of World Vision and its founder, as well 

as the rich historical and cultural detail he provides.  

These readers, King’s academic peers, may be 

disappointed by the fairly weak framing he provides in 

the introduction, which lacks any discussion of research 

methods or motivation. There is another gap worth 

noting, although it is more an inevitable limitation of the 

book’s scope than a core weakness: the role that host 

national believers—namely, local churches and national 

offices—have played in shaping World Vision. We get 

hints of this important dynamic and these important 

voices throughout the book. As King finally 

acknowledges in the epilogue, however, his focus is 

World Vision’s U.S. office.  As a result, King notes that 

more research is required to “to paint a full picture of 

the organization” (246). I heartily agree with this last 

point. Those wishing to better understand the complex 

but deeply formative relationships between an 

international Christian agency and its host national 

stakeholders might start with Barbara Cooper’s 

Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, an excellent 

study of the experience of the Sudan Interior Mission 

in southern Niger.  

While academic in nature, King’s book also has 

value for many international relief and development 

practitioners—leaders and young professionals alike—



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 1(2),  Winter 2020 

Vroegindewey, Book Review   118 
 

who have the patience to pause and reflect on the forces 

that shape their sense of calling, worldview, and the 

organizations and industry in which they work out their 

vocation.  

In my own particular case, as I read King’s 

description of the evolving evangelical social conscience 

during the past three decades—of which World Vision 

was both a product and determinant—I could identify 

cultural forces that helped shape my own convictions 

and experiences. For example, growing up in the 90s, 

one of my first windows on the world was reading letters 

from a child in Rwanda who our family sponsored. My 

first college text on international development was 

Walking with the Poor by Bryant Myers, a former VP 

of World Vision. Years later, while working in West 

Africa, numerous other personal connections with 

World Vision inevitably emerged: it was a major 

partner to the secular development agency I worked 

for, employed many members of my local church, and 

gave micro-loans to a good friend who was trying to 

grow his business.  

By the end of King’s book, the reader walks away 

with an appreciation for the particular and complex task 

that international faith-based organizations face—that of 

operating, building bridges, and maintaining 

consistency across disparate places, cultures, and 

stakeholders. In the case of World Vision, this has 

meant operating within “an American evangelical 

subculture, a collection of missionary agencies, a global 

evangelicalism, large-scale fund-raising non-profit 

organizations, and secular development INGO 

network” (14).  

In 2011, while working in Mali, I was able to meet 

a boy my parents had been sponsoring through World 

Vision. I met him and his family, walked around his 

village, and chatted with local World Vision staff. 

Afterwards, I remember trying to sort through the kinds 

of issues and tensions that King describes in his book.  

For example, I understood World Vision’s Area 

Development Program model—which allowed for long-

term presence and planning in a given community—to 

be the organization’s effort to do good development 

work.  Yet the realities of the approach—e.g., its focus 

on a community rather than the individual child within 

it, or its ways of contextualizing in a Muslim context—

felt removed from the child sponsorship model that was 

marketed in the U.S. and from the assumptions that 

were probably held by many U.S. sponsors (World 

Vision’s largest source of funding).  

Following my visit, my reflections gravitated 

towards these tensions because they resonated with 

many of my own challenges as a Christian development 

practitioner. My vocation was the same broader one 

that Bob Pierce, as an individual, and World Vision as 

an organization, had tried earnestly to live out. For this 

reason, there is a lot to learn from the seventy or so 

years of experience—mistakes, successes, and all—that 

King so meticulously recounts in his book.  

 

References 

 

Cooper, Barbara M. 2006. Evangelical Christians in 

the Sahel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University 

Press.   

 

Myers, Bryant L. 2011. Walking with the Poor: 

Principles and Practices of Transformational 
Development. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

 

 

 

Ryan Vroegindewey is a supply chain sustainability and 

development specialist, focusing on agri-food 

industry in Africa and the U.S. He holds a Ph.D. 

and M.S. in sustainability and agricultural 

economics from Michigan State University, and a 

B.S. from Covenant College. 

 

Author email: vroegindewey@gmail.com     
 

 

 

mailto:vroegindewey@gmail.com

