华福兰 · 1894 – 1972 · British
Frank Houghton (华福兰) was born in 1894 in Stafford, England. He studied at the University of London and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1917. In 1920 the China Inland Mission sent him to China, and his field was eastern Sichuan—the area around Suiding (now Dazhou), Wanxian, Liangping and Baoning (now Langzhong). Eastern Sichuan is mountainous and hard to travel, and it was one of the China Inland Mission's important regions in the southwest.
He later became bishop of the Anglican Diocese of East Sichuan. In 1940 he was appointed General Director of the China Inland Mission—a post previously held by D. E. Hoste (何斯德), and before him by Hudson Taylor himself. He took over at no easy time: the War of Resistance against Japan was at its height, missionaries were scattered across the inland provinces, and personnel, funds and safety were all problems.
The most significant event of his tenure was that in 1951 he oversaw the withdrawal of all China Inland Mission missionaries from mainland China. It was the hardest decision the mission had faced since its founding in 1865—eighty-six years of work, stations spread across eighteen provinces, and the graves of several generations all had to be left behind. After the withdrawal, the China Inland Mission was reorganised as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), its headquarters moved to Singapore, and its work turned to Southeast Asia. Leslie Lyall (赖恩融), who is also in this database, went on serving for thirteen years through this very transition.
Frank Houghton had another identity as well: hymn writer. His hymns "Thou Who Wast Rich" and "Facing a Task Unfinished" are still sung today, and the latter is often used as a hymn on the theme of mission. He also wrote The Two Hundred, an account of the China Inland Mission's recruitment of two hundred new missionaries in 1929; Leslie Lyall, Emil Fischbacher (巴富羲) and Otto F. Schoerner (石爱乐), who are also in this database, were all among those "Two Hundred" new recruits. He died in 1972.
One point needs explaining: his Chinese name is indeed Hua Fulan (华福兰; traditional 華福蘭), as attested by a separate article on the Chinese Wikipedia. When this database was compiling its list of candidates in the early stages, the name was mistakenly recorded as He Yisi (何义思); no Chinese or English historical source could be found to support it. It is corrected here and noted so that the error is not passed on.