James Fraser had a promising future as an engineer when, still a student at Imperial College in London, a fellow student gave him a tract that deepened his commitment to the Christian faith. At age 22, he decided to give up his career and devote his life to missionary work. In 1908 he joined the China Inland Mission, founded by Hudson Taylor.
He arrived in Yunnan, in southwest China, in 1910, assigned to evangelize the Chinese population of the region. In the mountains he encountered the Lisu people, who lived in isolation on the slopes along the Salween River, on the border with Burma. He began traveling on foot and on horseback between villages, learning the language and sharing in the simple daily life of the people.
The first years were marked by loneliness and few results. Between about 1912 and 1914, Fraser went through a period of deep discouragement and doubt about his own calling. Biographers record that, during this hardest stretch, he was even overtaken by suicidal thoughts, finding relief only by returning to stand firm in prayer and faith.
On January 12, 1915, while praying for the conversion of Lisu families, he became convinced that the answer had already been given and that all that remained was to believe it. He called this episode the prayer of faith and began asking friends in Britain to pray with the same specific conviction. Within a few months, the number of families turning to the Christian faith began to grow.
Between 1916 and 1918, the movement spread through the initiative of the Lisu converts themselves, reaching about six hundred baptisms. Fraser then devoted himself to the task of giving the Lisu language, until then unwritten, a system of writing. Together with colleagues from the mission, he revised and refined an alphabet that originated from the work of the Karen preacher Sara Ba Thaw.
With this alphabet, known today as the Fraser script, he began translating the New Testament into Lisu. With the help of missionaries Allyn and Leila Cooke, the translation was completed in 1936, but the first printed copies did not reach the Lisu villages until 1939, a year after his death. The complete Lisu Bible, with the Old Testament, would not be published until 1968. In 1929 he married Roxie Dymond, the daughter of a Methodist missionary based in Kunming, with whom he had three daughters. He continued traveling through the mountains even after taking on leadership roles in the mission.
He died in Baoshan, Yunnan, on September 25, 1938, of cerebral malaria, at age 52, leaving his wife pregnant with the couple’s third daughter. He never lived to see with his own eyes the full extent of the movement he had helped start among the Lisu. Decades later, most of this people in China would become Christian.
Fraser’s life shows that faithfulness in difficult fields often precedes, rather than follows, visible results. His insistence on asking for specific and persevering prayer for spiritual breakthroughs in isolated regions continues to inspire missionary intercession networks today.
