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One week after tsunamis swamped the shores of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and other South Asian countries—leaving devastated towns and rotting corpses behind them—the Christian international relief organization World Vision hit the ground running. On their website they put out a clarion call for generous donations, and to the press promised to raise $50 million for victims of the tsunamis—an amount that dwarfs the annual budgets of nearly every other Christian relief agency. But considering World Vision raised $1.5 billion last year, the goal may be more attainable than it sounds. If any Christian group has the economic muscle to follow through on such a grand promise, World Vision does.

World Vision has political clout too. Its international director Dean Hirsch collaborates with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. It's a major player in its field, commanding the respect of secular and Christian agencies alike. World Vision has offices in 100 countries and employs 22,000 workers, most of whom are native to the countries they work in. In fact, World Vision made a point of "indigenizing" its staff back in the 1970s in the effort to distribute decision-making among its many branches. I discovered this several years ago during a missions trip to Tokyo when I met with the director and staff of World Vision there, all of whom are Japanese.

The success of World Vision hasn't come without its growing pains, however—and a good deal of conflict. The dynamic and exhilarating days of the agency's early history looked quite different from what is has become. We can't really understand what World Vision is today unless we become acquainted with the man who envisioned the organization and gave it the compassionate mission it carries out. The "broken heart" of Bob Pierce is indeed the thread that ties together an increasingly diverse and complex body of people working on behalf of the most desperate and needy in nearly every part of the globe.

A fiery Youth for Christ evangelist, Pierce was quickly making a name for himself in the post-World War II climate, much as Billy Graham would a few years later. In 1947, he made his first international tour, traveling to China where he preached at various prestigious churches, including the Moore Memorial Methodist Church in Shanghai. He met with great success, as first hundreds then thousands came to listen to him preach. He even met with Shanghai's mayor and was promised the opportunity to preach in the city's largest auditorium if he agreed to return later that year.

But it was the plight of a little girl that captured Pierce's attention. Pierce had, at a missionary's invitation, agreed to speak to the children of a mission school about the love of Jesus. After the meeting was over, little White Jade had rushed home to tell her family about her newfound faith in Jesus. Her father responded by disowning her and throwing her out of his house. Disoriented and desperate, the girl turned to the missionary, Tena Hoelkeboer, who had invited her to the meeting to begin with. But the woman was already housing six children. Give me five dollars a year, Hoelkeboer told Pierce, and I'll add a seventh to my growing brood. Pierce took her up on the challenge, even though finances were already tight back home.

Moved with compassion, the young evangelist took his promise much further—White Jade was the catalyst that drove Pierce to launch World Vision in 1950. Following his trip to China, Pierce visited South Korea, where the storm clouds of war were gathering. There he saw desolate mothers and children wandering the highways in bitter cold as their husbands went off to war. And he found Korean Christians housing women and children far beyond their capacity, much as Hoelkeboer had in China. Appalled by the suffering he witnessed around him, Pierce paused to write a line on the fly-leaf of his Bible: "Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God." It would become his life's theme.

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