The Incomparable Pastor: Richard Baxter
The Breck Conference 2022
By the Rev. Dr. Greg Peters, Servants of Christ Research Professor of Monastic Studies and Ascetical Theology
When one hears the phrase “priestly spirituality,” it is unlikely that the name Richard Baxter comes immediately to mind. John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, George Herbert, and Michael Ramsey are more likely to come to mind than a Puritan like Baxter. But Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor is a classic text for priestly ministry. J.I. Packer wrote that “Baxter was a poor performer in public life . . . his combative, judgmental, pedagogic way of proceeding with his peers made failure a foregone conclusion every time.” Nonetheless, Packer is also quick to give credit where credit is due: “As a pastor, however, Baxter was incomparable.”
Born in 1615, growing up Baxter was not well-educated but was formed in part through the influence of his father and the writings of William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and Ezekiel Culverwell. After a short stint of formal schooling, he returned home in 1634, spending the next four years studying theology privately, reading Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Ordained by William Thornborough, bishop of Worcester, Baxter became curate at Kidderminster (1641-1642), returning there for fourteen more years in 1647.
Kidderminster contained around 800 homes with a population of about 2,000, many of whom were handloom workers. Baxter described his parishioners as “an ignorant, rude and revelling people.” Baxter, like all good pastors, threw himself into his work. In due time he was able to write that the “congregation was usually full . . . when I came thither first there was about one family in a street that worshiped God and called on his name, and when I came away there were some streets where there was not past one family in the side of a street that did not so; and that did not by professing serious godliness, give us hope of their sincerity.” By the end of his ministry in Kidderminster in 1661, there were 600 full communicants in his parish, a significant number compared with the number of communicants in other parishes. Baxter’s pastoral ministry was people-driven. He catechized two days a week and went to each parishioner’s home for an hour, claiming that the time spent in the home was more profitable than “ten years’ public preaching.”
In addition to his rich pastoral ministry, Baxter was a prolific writer: “My writings were my chiefest daily labor,” whereas “preaching and preparing for it were but my recreation.” Packer describes his literary output this way: “author of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650); The Reformed Pastor (1656); A Call to the Unconverted (1658); A Christian Directory (1673), and 131 other items printed in his lifetime; including Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696, autobiography); five other posthumous books and many unpublished treatises.”
Though Baxter was ejected from the Church of England in 1662, this seems to be based mostly on his unwillingness to renounce on oath Puritan ideals of reformation as a condition of incumbency. Though often erroneously labeled a Presbyterian, Baxter was a “reluctant Nonconformist who favored monarchy, national churches, liturgy and episcopacy, and could accept the unsympathetically revised 1662 Prayer Book” (J.I. Packer).
Though Baxter’s pastoral ministry was certainly undergirded by a host of good practices (e.g., heeding his own preaching before preaching to others, hard study, etc.), he reveals one in particular that seems right to reflect on during Lent: “Self-denial is of absolute necessity in every Christian, but it is doubly necessary in a minister, as without it he cannot do God an hour’s faithful service.” Self-denial for Baxter is a teleological category; that is, self-denial is necessary so that one does pastoral ministry for fitting end(s). Baxter rightly concludes that “ministerial work must be carried on purely for God and the salvation of souls, not for any private ends of our own. A wrong end makes all the work bad as from us, how good soever it may be in its own nature.” Baxter knew that a basic human temptation is to do something for our own sake, to engage in pastoral ministry because of what we can get out of it. In fact, Baxter seems to anticipate the modern phenomenon of the “celebrity pastor,” someone who makes the ministry about himself. Other “private ends” might be social recognition (something less common in today’s post-Christian world) or for financial gain (again, less common today) but anyone in ministry knows that the greatest temptation toward a wrong pastoral teleology is pride.
So, the way to achieve the right end (i.e., “God and the salvation of souls”) is to deny ourselves, that there is less of me and more of God: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). When a pastor-priest is able to set himself aside, God comes to the forefront. When our pastoral teleology is properly ordered, then, and only then, will God and salvation become the right and properly understood ends of pastoral ministry. In short, in Baxter’s pastoral theology there is no room for a celebrity pastor. To drive the point home, Baxter quotes from Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (36.3) on the main reason that one ought to pursue knowledge: to edify others and to be edified. But if one read’s Bernard’s full sermon it appears that what Baxter was particularly thinking about was Bernard’s conviction that there are two kinds of knowledge, “one contributing to self-importance, the other to sadness.” Bernard, of course, advocated the kind of learning that leads to sadness, since that is the kind of knowledge that leads to dependence on God and away from oneself. Baxter was in full agreement with the medieval Cistercian abbot!
Thus, in imitation of Baxter, let us practice the kind of ministry that is rooted in right ends, a ministry that keeps God and the salvation of souls front and center and places the pastor himself on the proverbial back burner. In this way, and in others, Baxter is a sage guide in the history of priestly spirituality!
Author of a new biography about Thomas à Kempis entitled Thomas à Kempis: His Life and Spiritual Theology (Cascade Companions, 2021), the Rev. Dr. Greg Peters is the Conference Chair of this year’s James Lloyd Breck Conference From Anchorhold to Parish: English Monasticism and Anglican Spirituality, June 22-24, 2022, at Nashotah House. Dr. Peters is a native Virginian who loves to travel (especially in Europe) and he loves to read. When not reading for work, he reads for fun! Dr. Peters enjoys the fiction of Paul Auster, Bernard Malamud, Chinua Achebe and the nineteenth-century Russian novelists. In addition, he loves the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. When it comes to non-fiction, Dr. Peters enjoys reading anything that has to do with theology, monasticism, or the history of the Christian church. When not working or reading, he enjoys spending time with his wife Christina and two sons, Brendan and Nathanael. Dr. Peters is an ordained pastor in the Anglican tradition, serving regularly in his local parish.