With an annual budget of two billion dollars, World Vision International's humanitarian influence can be felt across the globe. David King's God's Internationalists provides a compelling and insightful institutional history of the organization from its humble origins as an idea of Christian evangelist Bob Pierce to its contemporary status as one of the world's largest international nongovernmental organizations (INGO).

Situating the book within a budding field of scholarship on evangelical engagement around the world, King argues that internationalism is a significant and often forgotten characteristic of American Evangelicals (for example Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals [Oxford University Press, 2018] and Heather Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid [Harvard University Press, 2018]). Too often, he argues, scholarship on American evangelicalism in the twentieth century centers upon domestic cultural and political debates and thus misses the ways in which international and global issues shape the movement. King's emphasis on evangelicalism's internationalism further textures and balances out scholastic interpretations that heavily focus on domestic politics. By approaching this history through an institutional lens, King also seeks to disrupt what he terms “the ‘two-party’ narrative of twentieth-century American Protestantism” (251). World Vision's willingness to work with a diverse cadre of both conservative and progressive evangelicals but also mainline Protestants, Catholics, and even non-Christians encourages scholars to think beyond the conservative and liberal binary. As an institutional history, God's Internationalists also provides a compelling examination of the ways in which World Vision's bureaucratic employees negotiated the boundaries of its evangelical identity. While King does not wade too deeply into definitional debates over the term “evangelical,” his study shows the ways in which bureaucratic and professional employees of World Vision strategically utilized the term “evangelical” to garner the widest possible range of support. His institutional focus helps ground his study.

The first two chapters of book focus on Bob Pierce and the West Coast evangelical subculture that shaped his theological outlook. Pierce never planned to become an international missionary or humanitarian. A trip to China while working for the post–World War II Youth for Christ movement inspired him to pursue international missions. Driven by adventure and an uncanny ability to be “in the right place at the right time” (43), he formed World Vision as a “new kind of evangelical mission” (66). According to King, Pierce sought to rise above the factional fray of American Christianity to shape this missionary pursuit characterized by a concern for both the spiritual and physical needs of people abroad. Dismissing “heady theology,” King argues that Pierce “specialized in emotion” (63) and galvanized American evangelical support through both compelling depictions and strong rhetoric highlighting the spiritual needs of people abroad.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe Pierce's early leadership of the young organization and his resistance to organizational professionalization. He instead prioritized spontaneity and the freedom to make decisions as need arose. He pioneered World Vision's trademark fundraising tactic of Child Sponsorship, allowing Americans to financially support individual orphans around the world. Pierce's leadership style put him at odds with other evangelical organizations who were more concerned with theological particularities than Pierce's willingness to seize opportunities and work with individuals outside evangelical circles. The organization's transition to a second president, Stan Mooneyham, is the focus of chapters 5 and 6. During this time, World Vision navigated a U.S. evangelical community divided over the relationship between evangelism and aid programs. Bringing both anti-Vietnam advocates like Mark Hatfield and evangelical stalwarts like Carl Henry onto the World Vision Board of Directors exemplified Mooneyham's desire to avoid domestic debates in order to focus on “one thing: feed the poor in Jesus's name” (141). These chapters depict an organization that had grown beyond its founder's vision, being more willing to both professionalize and listen to the advice of non-Western Christians.

In the final three chapters (7, 8, and 9), King shows how World Vision negotiated the rise of the Religious Right and carved out a middle path for evangelical humanitarian work. The organization's continued attention on relief and development in international communities took money away from traditional missionary work to the chagrin of more conservative evangelical supporters. At the same time, it expanded the organization's footprint and allowed World Vision to create bilateral partnerships with the United States government and United Nations to foster both more and larger projects. In so doing, the organization sought a more professionalized workforce that spoke the language of INGOs. King shows how World Vision came to speak to a broad array of diverse communities. The organization continued to speak in an evangelical idiom in the United States, but sometimes “downplayed their evangelical identity” in other parts of the world (201). While the organization had tried the stay out of the fray of politics, by the 1980s, World Vision began attempting to steer policy and public opinion on issues ranging from famines in Africa to AIDS relief and even the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces. World Vision managed to address these issues while holding together a coalition of individuals from both across the evangelical spectrum as well as outside the evangelical fold.

While institutional histories can take on a narrow quality, God's Internationalists situates World Vision amid a wider cultural and religious context. King's work convincingly depicts a brand of evangelical internationalism, but it remains an open question as to how people in pews think about this internationalism. The work misses an opportunity to address the role of race in shaping the organization's mission as well as the constituent communities that supported this work. His depiction of the organization as a large professionalized, bureaucratic institution raises question as to whether a large portion of American evangelicals truly support the organization's approach to development and justice work or if they merely like being able to financially sponsor a Black or Brown orphan from another country. Aside from this lack of attention to race, King's history of World Vision provides a fruitful contribution to better understanding the internationalist dimension of twentieth century evangelicals within the United States.