The Reformed Pastor

It is a book about pastoral work that spends almost no time on preaching. Written by Richard Baxter in 1656, its subject is the personal instruction of every family in a parish, one household at a time. Baxter's 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.

Baxter had done what the book asks. 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 — instructing each household in person, and the town was changed by it. He wrote as a man who expected to be examined on the work he was pressing on others.

It was written in 1656 for a gathering of Worcestershire ministers who had agreed to attempt the same house-by-house instruction. That 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 — an appeal to conscience among peers rather than a set of techniques for beginners.

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. The book is organised around a final reckoning he believed was coming shortly, which gives its urgency about the care of souls a personal edge.

The first and longest section is addressed to the minister's own soul before it says a word about anyone else's. Baxter's ground is that a man who has not attended to himself will not attend to a parish — that the care of others has to begin with self-examination, or the whole work is hollow. Only after that does he turn to the duty owed to the people.

No. Though written for clergy, 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. It sets out what faithful pastoral care actually involves, which lets any reader recognise it — or its absence — in the ministry they receive.

That the heart of a minister's work is personal, not just public: knowing and instructing the people of a parish family by family, rather than only addressing them from a distance on Sundays. Preaching without that personal care, in Baxter's view, leaves the real work undone, however large the congregation.

Ministers have found it uncomfortable for three and a half centuries — which is roughly the response Baxter was going for. It has never stopped functioning as an examination of conscience for those in ministry, and its refusal to let a preacher be satisfied with the pulpit alone is exactly what has kept it in print.