George Muller

Overview

George Müller (also spelled Muller or Mueller; 1805-1898) was a Prussian-born evangelist and philanthropist who spent most of his adult life in Bristol, England.¹ An early leader of the Open Brethren, a branch of the Plymouth Brethren movement, he founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad in 1834 to support missionaries, and from it built and ran orphanages in Bristol that, over the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, fed, clothed, housed, and educated more than ten thousand children.²¹ Müller ran this work without soliciting funds or incurring debt, relying instead on prayer, and is remembered chiefly as an exemplar of persevering, disciplined prayer.²

Life and Ministry

Müller pastored the same independent congregation in Bristol for over sixty-six years, a Calvinistic Baptist church that held to premillennialism, celebrated the Lord’s Supper weekly, and admitted members who had not been baptized as believers.³ Early in his ministry, Müller recorded in his diary (1829) a decisive change of mind on the doctrines of grace, having previously called election “a devilish doctrine”:

Being made willing to have no glory of my own in the conversion of sinners, but to consider myself merely as an instrument; and being made willing to receive what the Scriptures said; I went to the Word, reading the New Testament from the beginning, with a particular reference to these truths. To my great astonishment I found that the passages which speak decidedly for election and persevering grace, were about four times as many as those which speak apparently against these truths; and even those few, shortly after, when I had examined and understood them, served to confirm me in the above doctrines.⁴

Through the Scriptural Knowledge Institution he founded in 1834, Müller established orphanages that during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century housed as many as two thousand children at a time and supported mission work throughout the world, funded entirely through unsolicited gifts that came in answer to prayer rather than appeals or debt.² According to John Piper, Müller “saw the great awakening of 1859 which he said led to the conversion of hundreds of thousands,” did follow-up work for D. L. Moody, preached for Charles Spurgeon, and “inspired the missionary faith of Hudson Taylor.”³

Theological Contribution

Donald Whitney places Müller among “the most God-anointed men of prayer ever seen by the world,” attributing the pattern of his answered prayers ultimately to God’s own sovereignty rather than to any technique Müller himself could claim credit for.² Müller nonetheless identified a specific, transferable discipline behind his own praying: a change he dated to the spring of 1841, when he discovered that meditating on Scripture before praying, rather than beginning the day with prayer directly, transformed his devotional life. He described his former practice and what changed:

Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer… But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.; and often, after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then really began to pray. I scarcely ever suffer now in this way. For my heart being nourished by the truth, being brought into experimental fellowship with God, I speak to my Father and to my Friend… about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word.²

Müller drew a sharp distinction between reading Scripture and meditating on it, warning that “the simple reading of the Word of God” without meditation can become information that “only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe.”⁵ He applied the same insistence on deliberate discipline, rather than mere feeling, to giving: “Are you giving systematically to the Lord’s work, or are you leaving it to feeling, to impression made upon you through particular circumstances, or to striking appeals? If we do not give from principle systematically, we shall find that our one brief life is gone before we are aware of it, and that, in return, we have done little for that adorable One who bought us with His precious blood.”⁶

Historical Significance

Müller sustained the Bristol orphan work for decades on unsolicited gifts rather than appeals or debt, and Whitney holds up his own account of linking meditation to prayer as a model discipline for private devotion.² His influence reached beyond his own congregation: he did follow-up work for D. L. Moody’s campaigns, preached for Charles Spurgeon, and, according to Piper, “inspired the missionary faith” of Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission.³ Tim Grass counts Müller among the early leaders of the Open Brethren branch of the Plymouth Brethren movement.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Arthur T. Pierson, George Muller of Bristol (originally 1899; reprint, Middletown, DE: Echo Library, 2009). ↩ ↩²
Donald S. Whitney, “Chapter 4: Prayer… for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, anniversary ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2024). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
John Piper, “George Mueller’s Strategy for Showing God” (Desiring God, February 3, 2004). ↩ ↩² ↩³
George Müller, diary entry (1829), quoted in Pierson, George Muller of Bristol. ↩
Donald S. Whitney, “Chapter 3: Bible Intake (Part 2)… for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, anniversary ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2024). ↩
Donald S. Whitney, “Chapter 8: Stewardship… for the Purpose of Godliness,” in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, anniversary ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2024). ↩
Tim Grass, Gathering to His Name: The Story of Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2006), reviewed by Richard E. Wood. ↩