With its multibillion-dollar budget funding scores of projects in over one hundred nations since its 1950 founding, World Vision’s history is vast and sprawling. As David King puts it, “the organization is simply too big and diverse to tell a single story.” In fact, “To paint a full picture of the organization, scholars would need to produce a number of ethnographically informed case studies” spanning many nations. Each “would convey a small piece of the truth about World Vision” (246). King’s book offers a substantial slice of World Vision’s institutional history that centers on its U.S. office. Drawing from years of meticulous research, God’s Internationalists paints a well-crafted and sophisticated portrait of key aspects of World Vision’s development across nearly seven decades.
Covering a range of topics reflecting divergent aspects of World Vision’s identity (for example, humanitarianism, evangelism, international nongovernmental organizations, and Christianity’s twentieth-century spread), God’s Internationalists is likely to...
