Andrew Murray

Andrew Murray was born on May 9, 1828, at Graaff-Reinet in the Cape Colony, South Africa. His father, also Andrew, was a Scottish minister sent out to serve the Dutch Reformed Church, and he prayed on Friday evenings for revival in that dry country for thirty-six years without seeing it.

At ten, Andrew and his brother John were sent to Scotland. They took degrees at Aberdeen, then went to Utrecht in Holland to study theology, where they found the faculty largely rationalist and joined a small student society that met to pray. Andrew came through it with a settled faith and was ordained at twenty, in 1848.

His first charge was Bloemfontein, in the Orange River Sovereignty, a parish the size of a small country. He rode enormous circuits across the veld to farms and trekker settlements, baptizing, catechizing, marrying, and preaching. For a time he was the only minister across tens of thousands of square miles.

In 1860 revival broke out at Worcester, where he was then minister. It began in a youth prayer meeting and spread through the Cape colony. Murray's own first instinct was to stop it, he walked into a meeting where everyone was praying aloud at once and ordered them to be quiet. He concluded afterward that God had been at work and he had nearly interfered.

He went on to Cape Town, and in 1871 to Wellington, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. He served repeated terms as moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. He founded the Huguenot Seminary for young women in 1874, modeled on Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, and a training institute for missionaries; much of the South African church's missionary movement grew out of them.

Around 1879 he lost his voice. A throat ailment silenced him for about two years, the same two years in which he began writing seriously. The books that came out of that silence are the reason most people know his name: Abide in Christ, With Christ in the School of Prayer, The Holiest of All on Hebrews, Absolute Surrender, Humility, The Spirit of Christ. He wrote more than two hundred books and tracts, in English and in Dutch, in a plain style meant for ordinary believers rather than scholars.

His theme almost never varied: the Christian's whole life is Christ living in him, and the way in is surrender. He was a Reformed minister who kept close company with the Keswick "higher life" teachers, believed in divine healing after his own recovery at Bethshan in London in 1882, and prayed openly and publicly for a renewed work of the Spirit.

He fought for his people outside the pulpit too, pressing for schools, for the poor of the interior, and against the treatment of Boer civilians in the camps of the South African War.

He preached into his eighties and died at Wellington on January 18, 1917, at eighty-eight.

Sources: J. du Plessis, The Life of Andrew Murray of South Africa; Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ and With Christ in the School of Prayer; Leona Choy, Andrew Murray: Apostle of Abiding Love; contemporary accounts of the 1860 Worcester revival.