The Reformed Pastor

A book about pastoral work that spends almost no time on preaching. Baxter's subject is the personal instruction of every family in a parish, one household at a time, and his argument is that a minister who preaches to hundreds on Sunday and knows none of them the rest of the week has not done the job.

He had done it himself. At Kidderminster he and his assistant set aside Mondays and Tuesdays to work through fifteen or sixteen families a week — “upwards of eight hundred families, in a year” — and the town changed. The book was written in 1656 for a gathering of Worcestershire ministers who had agreed to attempt the same thing, which is why it reads less like a manual than like a man pressing colleagues who have already said yes and might still not do it.

The severity has a source. Baxter wrote in constant pain and expected to die young — he was ill for most of his adult life and preached, in his own phrase, as a dying man to dying men — and the book is organised around an examination he believed was coming shortly. The long opening section is addressed to the minister's own soul before it says a word about anyone else's, on the ground that a man who has not attended to himself will not attend to a parish.

Ministers have found it uncomfortable for three and a half centuries, which is roughly the response Baxter was going for. It is also read by people who are not ministers, usually with a clearer view afterwards of what they are entitled to ask of one.