Saving the World from Suffering: The Development of the Christian Humanitarian Organization, World Vision

The past and present suggest two distinct pictures of World Vision.  The organization began in 1950 as a small American evangelical agency with a mission of evangelism and childcare in Asia.  Today, it is the world’s largest privately funded Christian humanitarian organization. Gone are the days of crusades and orphanages.  The organization now undertakes emergency relief, community development, and advocacy.   This paper examines World Vision’s contested response to and portrayal of suffering abroad.  As the leading Christian agency among international relief and development organizations, World Vision’s story speaks to the broader transition of Christian missions.  It also highlights the increasingly visible role religion plays within the broader field of global aid and development.   Within an American evangelical subculture, World Vision debated the relationship of evangelism and social action.  While some Christians advocated saving only souls and others only bodies, World Vision occupied a tentative middle ground that included both under a “holistic gospel.”  As their work expanded overseas, they also began to forfeit a former naïve apoliticalism and recognized they could not divorce religiously motivated aid from its political consequences.   Critiques from both global Christians as well as secular and mainline Christian development organizations also forced World Vision to reframe their religious response.  By the 1970s, World Vision embraced a partnership between local and international leaders to shape its policies.  It also began to see its response to suffering less as individual help and more as large-scale community development.  While World Vision continued to insist all employees profess a Christian faith, fewer seminary graduates and more technocrats with professional expertise came to supervise the organization’s work.   Attending to these transitions within World Vision may shed light on the way American evangelicals have come to view the world and their response to suffering.