Biography
Frank Houghton was born in 1894 in England. He grew up in a believing home and was educated at Oxford, where he trained for ministry in the Church of England. As a young man he heard the call to go to China. He joined the China Inland Mission, which had been started by Hudson Taylor, and sailed for the Far East in 1920.
He was sent to the province of Sichuan in the west of China, a land of mountains, great rivers and crowded cities. He learned the language and went to work among the people there. He was a quiet scholar as much as an evangelist, and he was known for his gentle spirit and his steady habits. He worked in a region that was often troubled by war and banditry, and he knew the dangers of life as a missionary. He also knew sickness and loss. He served the local Chinese church and helped to train its leaders.
His gifts were noticed, and in 1937 he was consecrated Bishop of East Szechwan in the Anglican church in China. It was a rare honor for a member of an interdenominational faith mission, and it reflected the trust the church had in him. In the following years, as war with Japan raged and the country suffered, he served the church faithfully. In 1940 he was chosen as General Director of the China Inland Mission. He took on that burden at the height of the Second World War, when missionaries were scattered, supplies were short and many fields were cut off.
After the war ended, he hoped the work would be rebuilt. Instead, in 1949 the Communists took control of China. Over the next two years the new government made it impossible for foreign missionaries to remain. The mission that had served China for more than eighty years had to leave. Houghton carried the heavy task of guiding hundreds of missionaries out of the country, caring for those who were detained and deciding what the mission would do next. Many workers had given their lives to China and found it hard to leave behind the believers they loved.
He led the mission through that grief. In 1951 the mission formally withdrew from China, and under his leadership it began to look to the other peoples of East Asia. It sent workers to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan and other places. In time it took a new name, the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. Houghton served until 1951 as head and then handed the work on to others, and J. Oswald Sanders later took the leadership. He helped steer the mission from a China-centered agency to a broader work across East Asia.
He also wrote. He is remembered for the hymn "Facing a Task Unfinished," which he wrote in the early 1930s as a call to missionary service, and for a Christmas hymn, "Thou Who Wast Rich Beyond All Splendour." He also wrote a biography of Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India, and several books on China and the work of the mission. His prose was simple and devout, and it carried a love for the people he served.
He was a gentle man who held a heavy post. He was not a dramatic leader, and some thought him cautious. Yet in a time of great sorrow he kept the mission together. He bore the weight of watching a field that had been the work of generations close to him. He prayed through it.
He died in 1972. His life reminds us that faithfulness is sometimes measured less by what we build and more by how we guide the work through loss. He took a mission that had been driven out of a nation and helped it find a new future, trusting that God had not finished with the peoples of Asia.