Samaritan's Purse has collected over 244 million Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes and operates in more than 100 countries. It started with one man's prayer.
A Prayer on Kojedo Island
Bob Pierce was an American evangelist who traveled throughout Asia after World War II with Youth For Christ. He encountered missionaries living among lepers and orphans, and the suffering he witnessed transformed him. While visiting children on the Korean island of Kojedo, Pierce wrote in the flyleaf of his Bible: "Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God."
That prayer became the founding principle for everything that followed. In 1970, Pierce established Samaritan's Purse to meet emergency needs through existing mission agencies and local churches. He saw the gap between awareness of suffering and organized response and set out to close it.
A Legacy Continued
Pierce died of leukemia in 1978. Franklin Graham took over as president and expanded the organization dramatically. Under Graham, Samaritan's Purse launched Operation Christmas Child in 1993, which has since delivered 244 million shoebox gifts to children in over 175 countries. In 2025 alone, 12.2 million shoeboxes were collected.
Today, the organization deploys over 541,000 volunteers worldwide across disaster relief, medical care, and community development programs. Pierce's prayer lives on in every deployment.
Learn more on our Samaritan's Purse page.
