Jim Houston 1922-2026

James MacIntosh Houston finished his well-run race on earth on March 15th, 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 twenty 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 sixty-four 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 twenty-five 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 thirty 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 twenty-five 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 ninety-five 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 fifty 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 twelve 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.

Interment will be family-only, and a public memorial service, in collaboration with Regent College, will be held on May 2nd, 1pm at First Baptist Church in Vancouver. This service will be live-streamed.

In lieu of flowers and gifts, the family asks that friends of Jim find others in their locale to encourage in his memory, or to contribute to the “Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund.”

The Jim and Rita Houston Courage Fund

"This fund has been developed by Regent College in consultation with the Houston Family. It 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 at www.regent-college.edu. "

 https://www.regent-college.edu/give/houston-fund