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Frank Mason North was born on December 3, 1850 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Charles Carter and Elizabeth (Mason) N. His earliest American ancestor, presumably, was Thomas North, who settled in Providence Plantations in 1670.
Frank North was educated in private schools and was graduated with high honors at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1872.
After a year in his father's mercantile business in New York City, North entered the Methodist ministry, being admitted to the New York Conference on trial in 1873 and ordained elder in 1877. He held six pastorates in the New York Conference and had a distinguished term of service in the New York East Conference at Middletown, Connecticut, from 1887 to 1892.
In 1892 he was appointed corresponding secretary of the New York Church Extension and Missionary Society, now the New York City Society of the Methodist Church, and held that office for twenty years. In this connection he directed more than thirty missions of all kinds and planted churches in new sections of the city. During this period he founded and edited the Christian City and conducted the National City Evangelization Union. From 1912 to 1920 he was corresponding secretary of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions, and thereafter, secretary counsel and secretary emeritus.
In his report, "The Church and Social Problems, " for the committee on the Church and modern industry, presented to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in May 1908, he formulated the social creed of the churches, which was adopted by the Conference and, in December of the same year, by the Federal Council.
North was a lecturer on missions at Drew during the last ten years of his life. He was a member of the governing boards of several colleges in the Far East and was actively interested in a large number of religious, educational, and charitable institutions, both of the Methodist Church and beyond its borders. He was a delegate to the major conferences of his denomination and to the great interdenominational gatherings of his time both at home and abroad.
In 1918 he conducted a party of church leaders through the devastated areas of Europe in the interest of reconstruction and was decorated in recognition of his services by France and Greece.
North was a trustee of Wesleyan University and of Drew Seminary and Drew University. He was a pioneer in turning the mind of the Methodist Church from the older individualism to united social action, and he led the Federal Council in its work for a more Christian social order. North wrote several hymns of high merit, but probably his best-known is the one beginning "Where cross the crowded ways of life. " This hymn was first published in the Christian City in 1903 and appears in many hymnals in use in various parts of the English-speaking world and has been translated into several foreign languages.
North was the outstanding Methodist of his time in advocating interdenominational cooperation and in insisting that such cooperation should rest on service rather than on creed. A Christian statesman, he, probably more than any one else, shaped the social policies of the Protestant churches of his time.
North supported the organization of labor and worked for a better treatment of the laboring classes.
On May 27, 1874 North married Fannie Laws Stewart of Philadelphia, who died in 1878; they had two children--Adolphus and Mason. On December 23, 1885, he married Louise Josephine McCoy of Lowell, Massachussets, who, with one son, Eric, survived her husband.
