Richard Baxter — “A Pen in God’s Hand”

Christian History magazine offers a major article on Richard Baxter in its Winter 2006 issue.

This will whet your appetite for more:

The Reformed Pastor, published in 1656, was the culmination of Baxter’s thinking about the ministerial role and the product of an enormously successful ministry in Kidderminster. Baxter believed that a true church was not composed of a mostly absent bishop and thousands of parishioners who preferred to pursue trivial pleasures rather than following the “plain man’s pathway to heaven.” Nor was it made up of a “society of friends” like the Quakers, who eliminated the office of pastor. A true church was both a hospital and a school, and healing and learning could only come through truth rightly taught and embodied. In that regard, the pastor, both as a role model for others and also as a shepherd and teacher, was absolutely crucial.

The pastor must be “awakened” and reformed himself–thoroughly converted, humble, and obedient–before he could awaken others. The goal of preaching was to exalt Christ by confirming, convicting, and comforting the faithful and by converting the rest. Baxter urged his fellow pastors to preach “with clear demonstrations of love to their souls, and make them feel through the whole, that you aim at nothing but their salvation,” so that “the increase of the purity and the unity of his churches” could be manifested.

Baxter himself preached twice a week, for an hour on Sunday and another hour on Thursday, and his preaching was characterized by enormous energy and urgency. “What!” he wrote, “Speak coldly for God and for men’s salvation! … such a work as preaching … should be done with all our might, that the people can feel us preach when they hear us.”