The year was 1947. It was the last day of an American evangelist’s visit to a missionary girls’ school in China when the school’s principal met him with a battered little girl in her arms.

Her name was White Jade, the principal told him, and she had just been beaten, disowned and thrown out by her family after telling them that she had become a Christian.

“Well, you’re going to take care of her, aren’t you?” Bob, then an evangelist on a mission trip to China, asked the principal.

Looking straight at him, she replied: “I’m doing all I can for as many children I can. The question isn’t what I’m going to do. The question is, what are you going to do?”

She put the little girl in his arms. As Bob held the crying and trembling girl, she felt to him heavier and heavier. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t take her home. What could he do?

Digging into his pocket, he found five dollars – it all was he had. He gave it to the principal and promised: “When I get home, I’ll send more.”

From receiver to giver

“My dad always said that was the moment when World Vision was born,” said Marilee Pierce Dunker, Bob Pierce’s second daughter.

Bob Pierce started what has become the largest international Christian non-government organisation dedicated to helping vulnerable children.

With a presence today in close to 100 countries, World Vision is known for its Child Sponsorship Programme, which allows donors to support a child at S$45 a month and keep in touch with them through letters.

Founder of World Vision, Bob Pierce, had his heart broken with compassion when he saw the wartime suffering of people in China and Korea in the 1940s and 1950s.

The organisation was birthed in 1950 after Bob was moved to action by the wartime suffering he witnessed on trips to China and Korea while working with Youth for Christ.

Marilee, Ambassador Emeritus at World Vision, was speaking to Salt&Light at her hotel in Clarke Quay ahead of World Vision Singapore‘s 40th anniversary charity dinner last Wednesday (July 10).

Reflecting on how World Vision Singapore has grown, the 74-year-old, who accompanied her father to Singapore almost six decades ago as a teenager, said: “Before, World Vision Singapore was a receiver, but now it is a donor, a giver, and I think that’s so amazing.”

A young heart broken

During her chat with Salt&Light, Marilee, who was born the same year Bob founded World Vision, shared candidly what it was like growing up with a father who had his heart so deeply broken for the poor and vulnerable.

“The seeds for compassion were planted in my life very young. I understood from a very young age that we didn’t live for ourselves. Our family was called by God to do something about the suffering in the world,” said Marilee, adding that her parents role-modelled what it looked like to have a compassionate heart.

Bob Pierce ministering to a young boy in Korea.

She remembers watching the films her father made during his trips to China and Korea about the war and the suffering of people, especially children.

“Those were the movies I grew up on. My parents never shielded me from the suffering of the world,” said Marilee, who was moved with compassion even as a little girl.

“My mum said, ‘Sometimes you would cry so loud, I’d have to take you out of the auditorium because you were disturbing people’.”

While she could not join him on his travels, she would, as a pre-teen, go to the World Vision office during her summer break to help count the notes and coins people sent in as donations, and take them to the bank.

Bob Pierce with two children injured during war.

Whenever her father was away for work, often in places that were a mystery to his family, she joined her mother, “a great prayer warrior”, on her knees to pray for his ministry and safety.

And though he was hardly around – he travelled 10 months out of the year – she did not resent him.

“I knew that my father was helping little children like me who didn’t have mummies and daddies to take care of them, who didn’t have a nice bed to sleep in or food to eat,” she said.

“And that he was also taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to them and people were getting saved. For me, even as a child, that was the most important thing in the world that you could do.”

Family paid the cost of Dad’s ministry

However, there were painful realities that came with having a father so deeply invested in his ministry.

“I didn’t really know my dad,” admitted Marilee. “When he was home, we could always count on going to Disneyland or something like that for a day, but after that he had to be in the office.

“He was making a movie, he had a weekly radio broadcast on Sundays. He was busy.”

Marilee (right) with her father, Bob Pierce (second from right), actress Julie Andrews (second from left) and some members of the Korean Orphan Choir in 1965.

While Marilee understood why her dad was often absent, the demands of Bob’s ministry put a huge strain on his family.

His daughter Sharon, who was depressed, took her own life at 27. His marriage suffered. He eventually moved out of the family home, and only reunited with his family four days before he died.

“Our family really faced some hard times because my dad was never around,” said Marilee, who detailed these familial struggles in her first book, Man of Vision, which she wrote after her father passed away from leukemia in 1978. He was 63.

“There were things I felt that people could learn from us, and I wanted to make it clear that our families should be our first ministry,” she added, explaining why she wrote the book.

Nevertheless, while recently writing her seventh book, titled The Audacity of Faith: Stories My Father Never Told Me, she had the opportunity to delve into his memoirs and diaries, to really understand what spurred him to do all that he did.

“I’ve been able to read what it was like for him to be out there, what it was like going to China in 1947 and ’48, what it was like being in Korea during the war, seeing the suffering that he saw,” she said.

“It’s been wonderful for me because now I can honestly say: I know my dad. And I understand why it was so important for him to be gone.

“And of course, after a while, I think that some of it became pretty addictive, to be out there. There is a certain point where it’s almost easier to be away than to be home when you’ve been away so much.”

World Vision advocates for all children to receive an education. The children pictured here are at a library built by World Vision in Cambodia.

Describing her father as “unique”, she added: “He was kind of a cross between a Christian Indiana Jones and Forrest Gump – he was always in the wrong place at the right time.

“And he was a man who was literally afraid of nothing. He just had one of those spirits that loved to run towards the fire, not away from it.

“I hope I’m a little bit like him.”

“Why aren’t you here?”

While Marilee always grew up knowing she wanted to serve the Lord, she only became involved with World Vision in her 50s.

Prior to that, she had spent her time as an actress in Christian films, in full-time ministry with her husband, and raising her two daughters.

Marilee speaking at World Vision Singapore’s 40th anniversary charity dinner, One Humanity One Hope, on July 10.

However, at World Vision’s 50th anniversary celebration, which she and her family were invited to, she found herself watching her father’s old films – for the first time in some four decades.

“I remember just starting to weep, and it was like a muscle in my heart that I hadn’t used for a long time was being moved,” she recounted.

As she heard how World Vision had grown over the years, she was astounded at how greatly God had used the organisation to help alleviate the suffering in the world.

“And suddenly the Lord just whispered in my ear: ‘Why aren’t you here?'” 

Marilee laughed out loud in the auditorium. “I said, ‘What? I’m a 50-year-old grandmother of two. I don’t speak another language. I don’t know how to dig a well. Why would they want me?’

“But when God speaks, I’ve learned you must answer.” 

She reached out to Richard Stearns, then the president of World Vision United States, and offered to help them answer phones, pour coffee or anything else they needed.

In 2001, she returned to World Vision as a writer, speaker and ambassador. She remained on staff for 19 years until she retired in 2020, but continues to speak at events as its Ambassador Emeritus.

Merilee with Ledama (right), a Kenyan child she and her husband sponsored, and his family. She sponsored Ledama from when he was five years old and put him through college. Today, Ledama is a teacher with a desire to give back to his community.

Reflecting on World Vision’s 74 years of growth, Marilee said the secret to its success has been partnering with others – not just with sponsors from all over the world, but with professionals who are equipped to make a difference.

“If we don’t know how to do something, we reach out to really skilled people and let them teach us what to do,” she said, noting that this was how World Vision became one of the largest providers of clean water in the world.

Compassion demands action

Decades after Bob sponsored White Jade, his first sponsee, World Vision continues to embody the heart of service he had.

“He didn’t come to get, he came to give,” said Marilee.

Wherever he went, he would ask the same question: “What can I do?”

World Vision provides clean piped water so that children, pictured here in Indonesia, can have better sanitation and hygiene.

“And that’s what World Vision does,” said Marilee. “We go into a community, assess the need and ask: ‘What can we do to help?’ It’s a powerful question.”

All this, they do in obedience to a compassionate God who Himself looks out for the poor and needy, and commands us to do the same (James 2:15-17).

“A key critical truth is that compassion demands action. If you have true compassion, you’ll do something about it.”

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