Anyone who has ever felt a call bigger than their own courage understands how Mabel Francis’s story begins. At nineteen, still in New England, she became certain that God would send her to Japan, a country she barely knew, and she spent her whole life honoring that invitation.
At the turn of the twentieth century, single women were rarely accepted for the mission field. Mabel persisted, wrote to the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and in 1909, at twenty-nine, sailed alone for Japan, where she would remain for decades.
In 1913 her brother Tom joined her, and in 1924 her sister Anne, by then a widow, also went to live in Japan. Together, the three siblings helped plant more than twenty evangelical churches in Japanese cities.
Over the following decades, Mabel walked alongside the Japanese people through the hard years of the Great Depression, as well as earthquakes, floods, and epidemics. In 1939, amid the tension leading up to the war, the mission agency withdrew its workers from Japan and her brother Tom returned to the United States, but Mabel and Anne chose to stay.
In 1941, with the Second World War already underway, Mabel turned her own home into a makeshift clinic to care for sick Japanese people. Suspected of espionage because they were foreigners, the sisters were placed under house arrest and later interned in a camp near Tokyo, where they remained for three years, refusing the offer of safe repatriation to the United States.
When the war ended, Mabel went to Hiroshima, devastated by the atomic bomb, and lived in one of the few houses left standing in the city. There she organized a church and a Bible school, seeing survivors come to faith amid the devastation.
Over the following four years, alongside her sister Anne, Mabel planted six new churches and opened a Bible school, primary schools, orphanages, and medical clinics, in a Japan marked by defeat and reconstruction. The testimony of having stayed in the country when they could have left opened doors of trust that preaching alone could not have opened.
In 1962, with more than fifty years in Japan behind her, Mabel received from the emperor the Order of the Sacred Treasure, fifth class, one of the highest honors given to a foreigner, along with honorary citizenship. She returned to the United States in 1965, at eighty-five, after fifty-seven years of continuous service.
Her autobiography, One Shall Chase a Thousand, published in 1968, is still read as a testimony of perseverance for those facing callings that seem too big to carry. Mabel Francis died in 1975, at ninety-five, leaving behind a legacy of churches, schools, and lives touched over nearly a century.
