Jim Houston, with his wife Rita.
Regent College posted Remembering Jim Houston after his death on Sunday.
Following Regent’s tribute I have posted three brief excerpts – from his Letters from a Hospital Bed; a 2017 Regent podcast interview looking back on his life; and a Christianity Today article by local writer Isabel Ong based on her recent visit with him.
James MacIntosh Houston finished his well-run race on earth on Sunday, March 15, 2026, in Vancouver, surrounded by his family and a host of loving friends. He was 103 years old.
Jim was born to missionary parents, James and Ethel May Houston, in Edinburgh, on November 21, 1922. His young boyhood was spent in Spain, and he later attended school in Edinburgh. After an unremarkable schooling, he won the gold medal in geography at Edinburgh University and completed a DPhil at Oxford University in 1950.
As a geographer, his best-known work was The Western Mediterranean World: An Introduction to its Regional Landscapes (1964). He was a fellow of Hertford College at Oxford for nearly 20 years. He became an esteemed scholar, author and mentor, but he was most of all a man profoundly shaped by his friendship with God.
Jim was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, and even as a young man had a passion for equipping and empowering Christian laypeople for their ministry, not just within the Church but in all of life. In January of 1962, Jim sensed a clear call of God – his “heavenly calling” – to which he was resolutely faithful for the next 64 years of his vigorous life.
In Oxford, Jim was active with many of the Christian intellectuals of the time, including C.S. Lewis. With his wife, Rita, he hosted gatherings of students in their family home and organized Bible studies that served as an early experiment in lay education.
After 25 years at Oxford’s Hertford, Brasenose and St Catherine’s Colleges, in 1970 Jim moved his family to Vancouver, where he became the founding Principal of Regent College, a graduate school on the UBC campus that would focus on educating the laity in their Christian faith.
Jim and W.J. Martin, a biblical language scholar from Liverpool, taught Regent’s first Summer Programs in 1969. Together with Carl Armerding and Ward Gasque, they welcomed the College’s first full-time students in 1970. In the early years, Jim held a joint appointment with the University of British Columbia and quietly supported UBC’s earliest advocates for environmental stewardship.
Jim’s great hope was that Regent would be a place where students would be thoughtful and competent in their faith and at the same time, their characters would be being reshaped, so that the ultimate result was not their qualification of expertise, but the transformation of their person.
“Theology,” he often said, “can never be abstracted. Theology has to be lived out.” An incarnate God requires an incarnate faith in His followers.
By the late 1970s, Jim’s scholarship was focused on the need for a “Christian mind” – a distinctly Christian epistemology or way of knowing. Through both his writing and his teaching, he played a leading role in the development of the field of spiritual theology.
In the words of Bruce Hindmarsh, Jim’s friend and current J.M. Houston Chair of Spiritual Theology, “Before anyone was using the word ‘postmodernism,’ Jim Houston was aware that the rising generation needed to see the Christian mind as a part of the response of the whole Christian person to God and his grace.”
As Regent grew, so did Jim’s unique and wide-ranging impact. He lectured in churches and at conferences and theological schools around the globe. It was not unusual for Jim to visit São Paolo, Sydney and New Delhi during the same summer. Jim co-founded the C.S. Lewis Institute in Washington, DC, and continued as a Senior Fellow there for many years.
Jim spoke prophetically on the loneliness of postmodernism while introducing countless Christians to the wisdom of spiritual forefathers and foremothers such as the Cistercians, the English Puritans and the Clapham Sect. He introduced students to authors like Henri Nouwen, Jacques Ellul and Søren Kierkegaard long before they achieved wide recognition in evangelical circles. As he did so, he listened to the hearts of his students and sought to encourage their faith.
Jim wrote, co-authored or edited more than 30 books. His book I Believe in the Creator was a foundational text advocating for care of the environment. His books on prayer and the longings of the soul included the award-winning The Transforming Friendship, and he wrote two books on mentoring and spiritual friendship.
He edited and updated a series of spiritual classics, bringing works by authors such as Teresa of Avila, Bernard of Clairvaux and Blaise Pascal to the top of many Christian reading lists.
He and his friend Michael Parker, who was 25 years his junior but recently pre-deceased him, co-wrote two reflections on aging well. With his longstanding Regent colleague and friend, Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, Jim co-authored two commentaries on the Psalms. More recently, Jim and his son Chris wrote Letters from a Hospital Bed.
Jim spent decades at the forefront of Christian intellectual life. His influence as a scholar extended beyond environmental ethics, the Christian mind and spiritual theology to encompass Patristics, Trinitarian theology and theological anthropology.
Jim continued teaching summer courses until 2018, when he was 95 years old! His courses on ‘The Christian Spirit,’ ‘Child Theology’ and ‘Theo-Anthropology in the 21st Century’ were recent favourites.
He retired, officially at least, as the Board of Governors’ Professor of Spiritual Theology in 2000, but after a lifetime of nurturing and encouraging both students and many others in their Christian faith and their professional and personal lives, he could not stop. So, he simply continued to press on, well into the past weeks!
Fueled by a vision to which he was zealously resolved to be faithful, his determination to shape the community of faith continued well past his hundredth birthday. Before his death, Jim was pursuing projects on a range of subjects, including Christian emotion and the role of children in theological reflection.
For all his intellectual and academic stature, Jim was above all a trusted and treasured brother in Christ. Countless Christians spoke with him just once, but found their lives changed by that never-to-be-forgotten conversation. He acted as a spiritual director long before Protestants recognized and adopted the role.
As founding Principal and later as a professor, mentor, friend and fellow pilgrim in the way of Jesus, Jim Houston played a formative role in the Regent community for well over 50 years.
Often, he and Rita – his most able foil! – had an impact around a meal table, which simply stretched to welcome the guests who appeared. When he travelled, he often gave small gifts – he called them “courage money” – intended to embolden, encourage and cheer on their recipients to embrace risk in faith in whatever domain their call was heard.
While the Regent community and Jim’s family grieve our loss, we are deeply grateful for the life Jim lived, and we rejoice at the new life that is his in Christ.
Jim was predeceased by his wife of 60 years, Rita (Davidson) (2014), and his two younger sisters, Louise (2003) and Ethel (2018). He is survived by his four children, Chris (Jean), Lydele (Gordon), Claire (David) and Penny (Wayman); by his 12 grandchildren, Jen (Tim), Nick (Yolandi), Allison (Jordan), Amanda (Scott), Justin (Britt), Stephen (Christy), Jonathan (Sophie), Julian (Angela) and Natalie; and by his 17 great grandchildren, Luke, Chelsea, Charlotte, Ian, Zoe, Bennett, Danica, Brinley, Emmy, Arden, Jacob, Addie, Brooklyn, Winston, Heidi, Samuel and Elisabeth.
Memorial service
The interment will be family-only, and a public memorial service, in collaboration with Regent College, will be held at First Baptist Church in Vancouver May 2, 1 pm. This service will be live-streamed. Further information, including service details, will be posted on Regent’s website as it becomes available.
In lieu of flowers or gifts, the Houston family asks that friends of Jim find members of their community whom they can encourage in his memory. One way to do so is to contribute to the newly-established Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund.
Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund
Regent College is pleased to announce the formation of the Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund. Developed in consultation with the Houston family, this fund exists to embolden prospective students and recent graduates to step forward in faith as they follow God to and beyond Regent College.
Guided by the values of compassion, companionship and courage, it will provide tangible support and encouragement to members of the Regent community as they embrace their myriad vocations in the marketplace, the church, the academy and anywhere else Christ leads them.
To learn more or make a contribution, please visit the Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund page.
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Bruce Hindmarsh presented ‘Songs of Faith (‘a seminar on Christian formation through hymnody’) at Kerrisdale Presbyterian Church yesterday (March 18). Referring to Jim Houston, he said at one point that his daughter Lydele had been playing ‘Be Thou My Vision’ for him: “she turned around and he was gone.” He still loved hearing and singing the old familiar hymns.
This image accompanies Letter #53 of ‘Letters from a Hospital Bed,’ on his site.
Following are three excerpts by and about Jim Houston:
- From Letter #53 (the final one) in Letters from a Hospital Bed, “penned by [his son] Chris around the vision of Jim” during the year leading up to his 100th birthday (and prefaced by Bruce Hindmarsh):
Many decades ago I had the great privilege, after attending the Urbana Inter-Varsity Conference, to be encountered in such a way that, like Paul, I have never been the same since.
The first night we arrived back from the conference in Winnipeg, where I was a visiting professor, I was awakened early in the morning by a great light at the foot of my bed.
Spontaneously, I responded from my heart, “Lord, what do you want me to do?”
With no clear answer I simply waited for six years before I knew what to do. I was to give up my career as a Professor at Oxford, and without promises of any substantial financial support, to start Regent College with a few friends. My pulse-beat every moment since that mystical appearance was like that of the Apostle’s witness, before the Roman leader: “So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven.” (Acts 16:19)
That has been my heartbeat ever since. I became unconscious of ‘any fruit-bearing,’ simply of having a new identity ‘in Christ,’ and a deepening desire that I would never grow faithless to His heavenly calling on my life.
(I found Letters from a Hospital Bed in a little free library just last night; that was a blessing.)
2. Asked during a 2017 Regent College Podcast about the vision that drew him to Vancouver, he said:
The vision that drew me here . . . I got disenchanted with the ivory towers of Oxford. It’s like climbing onto the Tibetan plateau and then it’s very dull. So I was always looking for a challenge of something else.
What certainly helped a lot was the awareness that having visited Vancouver from, say, 1962, I began to have a friendship with some of the visionaries that were here, who wanted to resurrect a new Bible college that had disappeared. And so they invited me to consider coming to do that.
And I said, no, I’m afraid not, because, it’s not that I’m being academically snobbish about it, but the fact is that my life has been in Oxbridge an academic environment. So what I would envisage is that we bring our Christian faith onto the academic marketplace and seek to have affiliation with a university. This would not be possible in Oxford, so that’s why I was prepared to leave Oxford. . . .
3. Isabel Ong is Asia Ideas Editor for Christianity Today. But she also lives in Metro Vancouver and holds a Masters in Christian Studies from Regent College.
She met with Jim Houston shortly before his 103rd birthday; her article was posted March 17.
She ends with this:
And when I asked if there is anything else he wants to share with CT readers, Houston said without missing a beat, “Prayer is not [just about] saying prayers. Prayer is without ceasing. . . . Our Lord is the best friend you could ever have.”
Houston showed me the psalm he has chosen to exhibit at his memorial: Psalm 1, which hangs in a wooden frame across from his desk.
The words of the psalm are in calligraphy alongside an image of a leafy tree with its roots stretching down, a depiction of how “those enriched roots multiply great fruits,” Houston said.
The psalm reminds him that he wants to be a righteous man, to be “right-related to the God who inspired Moses to [write] the Ten Commandments.”
I asked if I could pray for him. Instead, he took out a small bottle of anointing oil and dabbed it on my forehead, asking me to smell it. This is frankincense, he said, and then prayed, “Dear Lord, may you anoint my dear sister so that she knows what future mission she’s due for you. So guide her and bless her, and may you be her best friend. Amen.”
He closed our time together by singing aloud, in a tremulous yet clear voice, the words of a hymn: “May the mind of Christ our Savior / Live in me from day to day.”
Many years ago at Granville Chapel, Jim preached a sermon on “not selling your birthright for a mess of pottage.” It was a pivotal message for some dear friends of mine. One wonders if Regent will recover its birthright? Initial indicators are not promising. Jim will be greatly missed.