STAN MOONEYHAM RELAXED IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR in the pastor’s study at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles. Across the desk from him sat the pastor himself, Dr. Ed Hill, who had invited Stan to speak at Mt. Zion that Sunday evening in early December 1977. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Stan was white and lean with a full head of snow-white hair; Ed was black and stout and had no hair at all. Stan lived in the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley; Ed lived in one of the worst parts of Los Angeles. Stan’s organization was fewer than twenty-five years old; Ed’s church had been around for more than a century.
Despite their differences, they shared a common background and passion that made them friends, and their meeting that night was like the crossing of two live wires.
Ed tossed a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times across the desk to Stan and pointed to a photo on the front page. “What are you going to do about that?” he asked.
Stan looked at the photo, then at his friend. He had no idea what to say.
Walter Stanley Mooneyham was born in a small farming town thirty miles south of Tupelo, Mississippi, just three years before the Great Depression began. He was the seventh son of a poor cotton sharecropper, and when the bottom dropped out of the cotton market during the Depression, he experienced the effects of poverty and hunger firsthand. Like many young men of his generation, Stan couldn’t wait to escape the dreariness of farm life and see the world, and when he came of age in 1944, he joined the navy and served the remainder of the Second World War in the South Pacific, where he added death and destruction to his list of life experiences.
Stan had a strong desire to tell others about those experiences, so after the war he studied journalism at Oklahoma Baptist University on the G.I. Bill. When he graduated, he took a job writing obituaries with the Shawnee, Oklahoma, News-Star, but he wasn’t satisfied writing about the dead; he wanted to write about the plight of the living and the suffering of the poor, and before long he realized he wanted to do more than just write about those things—he wanted to help. His vision for assisting the poor and suffering kept expanding, from his city to his nation to the world. He first took a job as pastor of a small local church, then put his journalism training to work as a media liaison and advance planner for a large international ministry, where he saw up close what he later described as “the awesome human needs.” He was working in Singapore in 1969, when he was asked to become the second president of a fledgling relief organization called World Vision.
World Vision was started in the early 1950s, to provide food, clothing, and medical supplies to orphans in the wake of the Korean War. They began their relief work by soliciting clothing and supplies from corporations to meet emergency needs, and they developed an innovative child sponsorship program to assist on an ongoing basis. By the 1960s, the organization was global in scope; and by the 1970s, they were expanding their relief efforts to include agricultural and vocational training for families to create self-sustainable relief from poverty and hunger.
The organization was a perfect match for Stan, and he dove into the job of president with all the passion and energy he had—and he had plenty. When Stan came in as president, World Vision had an annual budget of $7 million; by the time he left, the organization had an annual budget of $158 million and a worldwide staff of eleven thousand. He constantly challenged others to “Come walk the world,” and he practiced what he preached. He spent three-quarters of his time traveling the globe and made connections in capitals all over the world.
Stan pioneered the use of direct mail and telethons to raise awareness of the needs of the poor and to solicit donations, which he did with great passion. He was sometimes criticized for his emotional financial appeals, but he was a passionate man and he refused to treat poverty and hunger as academic topics. “We are accused of emotionalism,” he once said, “but hunger is emotional, death is emotional, and poverty is emotional. Those who wish to make it all seem neat, clinical, and bureaucratic are the ones falsifying the picture, not us.”
Ed Hill grew up during the Great Depression too. He was one of five children raised by a single mother in rural Texas, where men like Ed usually dropped out of school by the tenth grade and spent the rest of their lives doing manual labor for $2 a day. But Ed managed to finish high school—in a log cabin, no less—and even enrolled in college at Prairie View A&M, though he had no money to pay for it. He got off the bus in Prairie View, Texas, with a suit, a couple of pairs of jeans, a few shirts, and $1.83 in his pocket. But Ed received an unexpected four-year scholarship that paid his tuition, room and board, and $35 each month that he could spend any way he wished. That was more money than he had ever seen in his entire life.
“I didn’t really know I was poor,” Ed said. “Poverty was a matter of spirit, and we were always rich in spirit. The fact that I lived in a log cabin was not embarrassing to me. The fact that my shoes had holes in them wasn’t embarrassing to me because everybody else’s did. But we all said, ‘It won’t be that way forever.’ ”
That spirit led Ed to become a pastor and to get involved in the early civil rights movement, where he became a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. Ed worked tirelessly and passionately to meet the needs of the poor in his community, and he pushed for social and economic reform at a national level. In Houston Ed became known as “the Hellraiser,” which was an odd title for a pastor, but it accurately described his passion and determination.
In 1960, he came to Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church and he brought his zeal to help the poor with him. Mt. Zion was located in one of the poorest sections of Los Angeles, which gave him plenty of opportunities to help. “The average income is between Skid Row and welfare,” Ed used to say, and he knew that his community was struggling with not only poverty but with all the social problems that came with it.
Ed made the struggles of the poor and underprivileged the focus of his preaching, and he was known for preaching with tremendous passion—and endurance. “I can only guarantee here what time we get started,” he said. “I’m not in charge of the close.” But he didn’t just preach about the problems; he got busy doing something about them. Under Ed’s leadership Mt. Zion started the Lord’s Kitchen on Fifty-Ninth and Main, which eventually served between two thousand and five thousand meals every week free of charge, and they set up a clothing store that distributed hundreds of thousands of articles of clothing at no cost.
South Central Los Angeles was the focus of many studies on the problem of poverty in America, but Ed had little patience with people who only wanted to study a problem without getting involved. Ed believed in getting things done, and he knew from long experience that people can accomplish great things if they will only try—especially when they work together. J. Edgar Hoover once called in Ed and two hundred other leaders to discuss the problem of violence that was being caused by the Black Panthers in New York City. The Panthers were about to ruin New York, Hoover said. Stores were forced to close at four o’clock, and every day four million people jammed the bridges, trying to make it safely into suburbia before dark.
Ed raised his hand. “How many Black Panthers are there?” he asked.
“Eighty-one,” Hoover replied.
Ed shook his head. “If eighty-one Black Panthers could plan the disruption of New York, could not eighty-one people plan the construction of New York?” That was Ed’s philosophy: even a small number of dedicated individuals can produce radical results.
Ed got involved in community relief work at all levels, and he didn’t hesitate to get involved in politics when it served the interests of the poor. At different times he served as chairman of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, chairman of Economic Development, chairman of the Los Angeles City Fire Commission, and vice chairman of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning and Zoning. He was happy to work with anyone who shared his burden for the underprivileged, and he was willing to cross traditional lines to get things done—politically, ethnically, and even religiously. “I’m a born-again Christian,” he once said, “but I’m willing to cross religious lines for the good of the whole of the community.” That was an unusually flexible attitude at the time, and it earned him a lot of criticism from some circles.
It was also an attitude he shared with Stan Mooneyham. Stan was a Christian, too, and a former pastor. Stan’s goal was to provide relief for the poor and hungry all over the world, and just like Ed, he understood that to accomplish his goal he would have to work across political, ethnic, and religious lines. World Vision was a Christian organization, but many Christians at the time placed a greater emphasis on meeting spiritual needs than physical needs. Stan wanted to combine them. In order to work across political lines, he refused to be identified as either a conservative or a liberal, and in the politically polarized Vietnam era, that approach earned him criticism from both sides of the aisle.
Both men were products of the Great Depression, both had experienced poverty and suffering, both possessed boundless passion and zeal, both were deeply committed followers of Jesus, and both were determined to express their faith by helping the poor and suffering wherever they found them and in any way they could. Though they couldn’t have looked more different, Stan Mooneyham and Ed Hill could not have been more alike.
So when Ed tossed the Los Angeles Times across the desk, Stan picked up the paper and looked at the photo. It was a picture of a terrified Vietnamese woman and her unconscious daughter cowering under a canvas in the bow of a small boat. The article said they were refugees who had risked their lives to flee Vietnam, and though their boat had managed to make it safely to Thailand, the authorities there would not allow them to land, and they were waiting to be pushed back to sea, where they would most likely die. “Boat people,” the article called them, and it said there were thousands more like them, and the number was increasing every month.
Stan was stunned by the photograph. “The agony on the woman’s face wrenched my heart,” he said later, and he was dismayed that though he was president of an international relief organization, he had never even heard of the boat people. Stan had spent most of that year in Africa, where World Vision was expanding its work. Somehow he had failed to hear about this tragic development in Southeast Asia.
Now he knew—but he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.
He looked up at Ed. “Why me?” he asked.
“Why not you?” Ed replied with a shrug.
“It’s not my responsibility,” Stan countered, but he had heard that excuse from others so often that he couldn’t believe he just used it himself.
Ed just looked at him. He had heard that excuse a thousand times, too, and it carried no weight with him.
“It’s too big for us,” Stan went on. “World Vision is a young organization. We don’t have the budget or the manpower for something like this—it could cost millions.”
Ed said nothing, so Stan kept going.
“We’re an army, not a navy—we have no experience with operations like this. Besides, it’s too political. We’ve got projects going on all over Asia, and if we put our foot in the middle of something like this, we could be risking everything.”
Ed still said nothing, and it was making Stan angry. Ed wasn’t known to be a man of few words, and when he said nothing, he was trying to make a point. Stan knew that Ed didn’t have to argue with him because Stan was arguing with himself. His reasons for not getting involved with the boat people were good reasons, logical reasons, practical reasons—but somehow none of them could stand up to that poor woman’s photo.
“I’ll look into it,” Stan mumbled, “and I’ll pray about it.”
That was all Stan agreed to do, but Ed smiled and nodded, and Stan knew why. The two men could not have been more alike, and that sly old fox knew that in his heart, Stan Mooneyham was already committed.