Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Life

Robert Murray M'Cheyne was born on May 21, 1813, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the youngest of five children. In Korean, his name is also rendered with an alternative transliteration of "Murray." Raised in a devout family, he memorized the Westminster Shorter Catechism as a child. He studied classics at the University of Edinburgh. He is reported to have experienced conversion after the death of his elder brother and then to have chosen to enter the ministry. During his theological training he studied under Thomas Chalmers, and he was deeply influenced by the biographies of figures such as Jonathan Edwards.

In 1835 he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Annan. He then served as assistant to the Rev. John Bonar in the parishes of Larbert and Dunipace, near Falkirk. On November 24, 1836, he was inducted as the first minister of the newly established St. Peter's Church in Dundee, the only congregation he served until his death. In 1843 he contracted typhus (an acute fever transmitted by lice) and died on March 25 at the age of twenty-nine. He never married.

Ministry and Achievements

• Pastoral ministry and revival: He held Thursday prayer meetings and started a Sunday school for children and Bible studies for young people. In 1839, while recuperating from poor health, he joined a deputation sent by the Church of Scotland to Palestine. The deputation was charged with investigating the condition of the Jews there, and Andrew Bonar was among its members. During M'Cheyne's absence, William Chalmers Burns, who later became a missionary to China, took over the preaching. A revival broke out at St. Peter's during this period, and it is regarded as having had a significant influence on the religious life of eastern Scotland.
• Mission to the Jews: The deputation's report was published as Narrative of a Visit to the Holy Land and Mission of Inquiry to the Jews. The inquiry led the Church of Scotland, and later the Free Church that separated from it, to begin missions to the Jews.
• Bible reading plan: In late 1842 he prepared a reading plan titled "Daily Bread" for his congregation and published it in early 1843. By reading an average of four chapters a day, one reads the Old Testament once and the New Testament and the Psalms twice in a year. In the preface he expressed the hope that the whole congregation would read the same passages on the same day and discuss together what they had read.
• Writings: He left a number of poems, including the hymn "Jehovah Tsidkenu" (1834). In 1844, the year after his death, his friend Andrew Bonar compiled his memoir and literary remains and published them as Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea, M'Cheyne is known above all for the "M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan." The plan assigns four passages to be read side by side each day; January 1 begins with Genesis 1, Ezra 1, Matthew 1, and Acts 1. The plan is used both for individual reading through the Bible and for congregational reading programs. Some churches post the daily passages on their websites so that members can read together. Smartphone apps containing the text of the Revised New Korean Version and the Korean Revised Version, as well as commentaries that follow the plan's sequence, are also available. Christian media in Korea often present him as an example of a minister who pursued piety and holiness during a brief life.

Assessment

M'Cheyne is remembered as a man of Christ-centered preaching and prayer, and in Korean church circles he is sometimes called "the saint of Scotland." He died two months before the 1843 split in the Church of Scotland known as the Disruption.

M'Cheyne himself set out cautions about the reading plan in his preface. Reading according to a fixed rule, he warned, can drift into a religion of mere form without the heart, and the daily portion may come to feel like a heavy burden. He went so far as to write that if such formalism should prove harmful to the soul, it would be better to discard the plan altogether.