David King

Born in Anniston, Alabama, David graduated from Samford University in 2001 with a B.A. in History and earned his Master of Divinity degree at Duke Divinity School in 2004. He served two years as a pastoral resident at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, TX, through the Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry program. In 2006, he entered the Graduate Department of Religion at Emory University. Trained as an American religious historian, he employs ethnographic and historical methods to explore the complexity of twentieth-century American and global evangelicalisms. His current work traces the evolving understandings of mission and public policy within the history of evangelical international relief and development organizations.

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Dissertation Abstract

Seeking a Global Vision: The Evolution of World Vision, Evangelical Missions, and American Evangelicalism

The past and present suggest two distinct pictures of World Vision. The organization began in 1950 as an American evangelical missionary support organization. Today, it is the world’s largest privately funded Christian relief and development organization. While it has remained decidedly Christian, World Vision has earned the reputation as an elite international non-governmental organization (INGO) managed efficiently by professional experts fluent in the language of both marketing and development. World Vision’s transformation is not simply another example of secularization, the story of a small, narrow organization encountering modernity, subduing its religious identity, and succumbing to secular methods in order to succeed. Instead, it is precisely the tensions and re-articulation of its religious identity that has helped to define the organization through its engagement with mainstream media, technology, and professional management, as well as in partnership with secular INGOs and in cooperation with the global church.

Through historical and ethnographic methodologies, I trace World Vision’s history as a lens through which to explore both shifts within post-World War II American evangelicalism as well as the nature of religious identity within philanthropic organizations. Attending to the evolution and interplay of World Vision’s practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure help explain how it came to rearticulate and retain its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a strict American evangelical subculture, how the ethos of evangelical missions more generally has shifted from evangelism to humanitarianism, as well as how exposure to global influences catalyzed the reflection and transformation of many American evangelicals’ identities at home. The tensions and evolutions within faith based organizations’ specific religious identities demonstrate a pivotal place for examining the evolving history and development of religious philanthropy.