The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century
Robert Murray M'Cheyne
1813–1843ScottishChurch of Scotland
Dead at twenty-nine, and Scotland has not stopped reading him since.
Summary
- Lived 1813–1843, Scottish.
- Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
- Hangs on The Revivalists.
- Tradition: Church of Scotland / Free Church.
The life
Robert Murray M'Cheyne took the new parish of St Peter's in Dundee at twenty-three and worked it like a man who knew he had little time, visiting the poor of a mill town street by street, preaching to crowds that filled a building meant for eleven hundred. In 1839 the church sent him with three others to Palestine to report on the condition of the Jews, a journey that nearly killed him with fever.
While he was away, the young preacher left in his place saw revival break out in the parish; M'Cheyne came home to find his people awakened without him and threw himself into it. He drew up a calendar for reading the whole Bible in a year, which is still printed and still used. Typhus caught from his parishioners killed him in March 1843, aged twenty-nine. Andrew Bonar gathered his sermons and letters into a memoir that has never gone out of print.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · 1790–1910
- 1812The Judsons sail, and Serampore burnsAdoniram and Ann Judson left Salem in February, the first American foreign missionaries sent out by a board. In March a fire at Serampore destroyed Carey's printing house, type, paper, and years of manuscript. He wrote that the loss was heavy but the ground was already cleared, and began again.
- 1825George Müller is convertedA German student with a record of lying and petty theft went along to a small Saturday prayer meeting in a private house in Halle, mostly out of curiosity. He walked out changed, and spent the next seventy years proving in public that God answers prayer.
- 1840Livingstone sails, and the Burmese Bible is doneDavid Livingstone, a Scottish mill worker who studied medicine at night, left London in December for southern Africa; he had wanted China, but a war closed it and Robert Moffat's talk of "the smoke of a thousand villages" turned him south. That same year Judson finished revising his Burmese Bible, first completed in 1834, twenty-one years after he landed.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Robert Murray M'Cheyne at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Died at twenty-nine of a fever caught from his own parishioners, leaving a Bible reading plan people still follow.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.
Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall
_-_William_Carey_(1761%25E2%2580%25931834)_and_His_Indian_Pundit_Mrityunjaya_Vidyalankar_(c.1762%25E2%2580%25931819)_-_HH1_-_Regent's_Park_College.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.
Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.
Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.
Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.
Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.
Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.