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Isabel Ong in Vancouver
Jim Houston’s scholarship centered on communion with God. His life in a Canadian care home continues to reflect this pursuit.
Today is Jim Houston’s 103rd birthday. When I visited him last month, he sat in a plush armchair and fiddled with his MacBook as pale sunlight streamed in from a set of windows beside him. Loose sheets of paper bearing his cursive handwriting spilled haphazardly from a short stack of books on his desk.
Even in his Vancouver care home, the centenarian theologian gave off a professorial air. His theological writing career has exceeded most people’s lifespans. From age 99 to 100, Houston posted on his blog dispatches from his hospital bed. Last year, at 102, he coauthored A Vision for the Aging Christian.
“What does it feel like to be turning 103?” I asked. Houston answered as if it was obvious: “Well, I’m very grateful to God, of course.”
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Generations of evangelicals in Canada know Houston as the founding president of Regent College in Vancouver. He moved there from the University of Oxford, where he had regularly studied the Bible with C. S. Lewis. Houston published an array of books on Christian spirituality, and as the years went by, his ministry included a focus on caretaking and aging, with the opening of the James Houston Center for Faith and Successful Aging.
Houston has married his theological interests with hands-on experience. For most of his life, that meant offering spiritual care for students and colleagues. But in his later years, his ministry takes place in the rooms and halls of a bright, spacious care home in Vancouver.
Houston’s private room lies in one corner of the building, his armchair and desk situated next to his bed and a walker. Illustrations of Psalm 23 and a kid’s painting hang on his walls, while a bookshelf displays pictures of family and a framed image of Russian painter Andrei Rublev’s Trinity.
Every morning, he eats breakfast with other residents in a communal dining space but takes his other meals privately as he prefers to read, write, and speak with his visitors. He also shares daily devotions with fellow seniors.
Residents or their families, many of whom aren’t Christian, seek him out when they want “someone spiritual” to pray for them, particularly as they near the end, his daughter Lydele said.
“I have opportunity to speak words of hope and kindness to a community who daily and more poignantly face death,” he wrote in his latest book.
James Macintosh Houston—Jim to most —was born in Edinburgh on November 21, 1922. He grew up in Spain, where his parents served as Brethren missionaries for the first seven years of his life. Then he moved back to Scotland, where he almost died of diphtheria. His memoir reveals that as a teenager, he struggled with low self-esteem.
After scoring a fellowship to Oxford, Houston studied geography and later lectured on cultural and historical geography in 1947 when the university was short-staffed after World War II. While at Oxford, he met his wife, Rita, and got married in 1953.
He had a mystical encounter with God in the early 1960s in Winnipeg, after attending an Urbana conference in the US, when he woke up in the middle of the night to a bright light at the foot of his bed. “Lord, what do you want me to do?” he asked.
Six years later, he received his answer: Leave Oxford for Canada.
The Houstons had planted their roots in Oxford, welcoming children as Houston became bursar of Hertford College. Yet Houston felt a steady pull toward establishing a school that would offer theological training for laypeople in Vancouver. This came about after he read a 1965 article by local businessman John Cochrane that proposed establishing a graduate Brethren school on the campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC), one that would be open to believers from all Christian traditions.
In 1970, Houston became the fledgling school’s founding president, modeling Regent’s evangelical ethos after Cambridge’s Tyndale House. Houston brought in other notable evangelicals, such as British New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce and Peruvian scholar Samuel Escobar, to Regent’s summer school program. Houston also taught, offering courses exploring Christian classics and traditions of Christian spirituality. In 1978, he stepped down as president and became Regent’s chancellor and professor of spiritual theology. He also cofounded the C. S. Lewis Institute in Washington, DC.
Fellow theologians have recognized and lauded Houston’s holistic perspective on the Christian life. “Throughout his adult life Jim has combated compartmental living in the interest of his concern that Christians be ‘alive to God’ in every sphere of thought and action,” his longtime friends and colleagues J. I. Packer and Loren Wilkinson wrote in a festschrift commemorating Houston’s 70th birthday. Houston’s life and teaching is “a constant reminder to us all that discipleship means to love God with one’s whole being,” Gordon Fee also wrote in an essay for the same book.
Regent graduate Rosie Perera first met Houston in a course entitled The Christian Mind. She found him esoteric at first: “He spoke as if his students already had a grounding in philosophy that I definitely didn’t possess.” But Perera grew to understand and appreciate his teaching. She also got to know Houston as a spiritual mentor. Students would seek him out for spiritual direction and end up in tears, the retired software engineer said.
“I was one who sat in the guest chair in his office and poured out my own struggles,” she said. “He asked me about my relationship with my father, and indeed he glimpsed things I had been only vaguely aware of.”
Perera also caught a firsthand glimpse of Houston’s love for the written word. In the late ’90s, she went to Houston’s home to help him get online:
He had heard it was important but had no idea what it might be good for—only that he didn’t want to miss the wave of the future. He already had email, so it wasn’t hard to set up a browser and show him the basics.
“So what can I do with it?” he asked. “Can I check the stock market?” I showed him how. “What else?” “Well, you can buy books,” I said, and introduced him to Amazon.com. He immediately wanted to create an account and enter his credit card number. He was like a kid in a candy shop, delighted as he clicked and ordered this book and then that one. I left that day realizing that I might have changed his life more than he had ever changed mine.
The Houstons regarded hospitality as equally important as theological study, hosting countless students in their home every Sunday afternoon. One of these students was Suzanne Taylor, who taught nursing at UBC and decided to enroll in courses at Regent. Houston began mentoring her, and she often spent time with him and Rita at their home for tea and soup.
For six years, Taylor’s husband, Robert, a retired UBC professor of surgery, has been going to a Vancouver men’s prayer breakfast group, which Houston has been a part of for half a century. “As I came to know the men, from varied professional and business backgrounds, I realized that many of them, if not most, were also there because of encounters with Jim during their lives,” he said.
Houston is now unable to attend the group meetings, but members of the prayer group often visit him. When he first moved into the care home, where Rita lived until her death in 2014, he had up to 17 visitors in a day.
Perera also visits Houston every few months. “His mind wanders more now, and his hearing loss makes real dialogue difficult, but he knows who I am and is glad to see me,” she said.
Houston is remarkably healthy for his age, with no health conditions apart from mobility issues and tiring easily. Four years ago, he had a bad fall and was bedridden for a month, thinking he would die soon. But he got up and began walking again at 99, according to Lydele.
Three years ago, Houston’s family threw a big bash at a local golf course to celebrate his 100th birthday. Some flew in from as far away as Ireland. His nine grandkids put up a skit and read a poem for him. His cake was shaped like a stack of his favorite books.
Houston’s 103rd birthday plans are a bit quieter. Last weekend, he celebrated with friends from Rita’s Bible study, and he will have lunch at his daughter Penny’s home. Lydele plans to take him to church—First Baptist in downtown Vancouver—on Sunday for the first time in months.
Communion with God still shapes much of Houston’s life and thought. When I asked, “What will you say to Jesus when you get to meet him?” Houston responded with a chuckle, “When I meet him? Oh, we’re in communication just now. I won’t need to do that then. You see, we have no idea what we’ll do in glory.”
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.”
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