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Pierce came home to North America determined to find sponsors for Korean orphans. That's when he came up with the idea of giving sponsors photographs of the children they were supporting with their donations. He also traveled throughout Korea filming the devastation he saw around him, then put together film documentaries that spurred Americans back home to give. "If you are ever going to do anything for Asia," he pleaded, "do it now!"

Pierce's employees at World Vision could count on his can-do attitude. If anyone presented him with obstacles to a relief project, he answered, "Cut through the reasons why things can't be done." The plight of refugees then coming out of Vietnam soon captured Pierce's attention, and World Vision went in with gusto—setting up housing and schools, providing wheelchairs and crutches to amputees, even starting a bakery which turned out high protein biscuits. It was a pattern that World Vision would follow again and again.

Pierce's evangelical fervor did not die as his life's work became more holistic. An early mission statement is unapologetically Christian: "World Vision is a missionary service organization meeting emergency needs in crisis areas of the world through existing evangelical agencies." Pierce listed five "basic objectives" for the organization: Christian social welfare, emergency aid, evangelistic outreach, Christian leadership development, and missionary challenge.

Like many small Christian organizations, World Vision revolved around its founder. The organization lacked any long-range plans or sophisticated mechanisms of administration. Early World Vision workers rather liked it this way; lean management gave people freedom to act quickly and semi-autonomously. But even Pierce recognized the need for someone to manage the growing enterprise. His choice of Ted Engstrom, a friend from his early days with Youth for Christ, would prove to be providential, for reasons as yet unanticipated by Pierce.

There's a flip side to the success story of Bob Pierce. Having an impetuous nature, Pierce could—and did—rub people the wrong way. When World Vision's board of directors proposed organizational changes that would make Pierce more financially accountable, he blew up and tendered his resignation. The next day—to the Pierce family's astonishment—the board accepted his offer, replacing him with Engstrom as World Vision's new chief. Pierce's wife, Lorraine, pled with members of the board to retain him. But the deed was done, the bridge burned.

Even sadder was the strain Pierce's long tours away from home placed on his family. Following his resignation from World Vision, Pierce and Lorraine took a "goodbye tour" of Asia, and one of his daughters, Sharon, pled with him over the phone to come home early as she missed him desperately. Characteristically, he refused. Desperate, Sharon slashed her wrists. Though unsuccessful at first, she eventually succeeded in committing suicide while Pierce was away in Switzerland being diagnosed with exhaustion.

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