Who Was Richard Baxter? The Puritan Pastor of Kidderminster
Richard Baxter was an English Puritan pastor who lived from 1615 to 1691. He is best known for his ministry in the market town of Kidderminster, in Worcestershire, where he preached and taught his people family by family for about nineteen years, and the town was changed. He wrote more than a hundred books. Four are still read today: The Saints' Everlasting Rest, on heaven; The Reformed Pastor, on the minister's work; A Call to the Unconverted; and A Christian Directory, a huge handbook for daily Christian living. He was often sick, often in trouble with the authorities, and never stopped working for the good of souls.
Here's the story of his life, what he taught, and where to start reading him.
A boy in Shropshire
Baxter was born on November 12, 1615, at Rowton in Shropshire, at his grandfather's house. He grew up in a country parish where the preaching was poor and the readers in church were often careless men. He had little formal schooling and never went to university, something he regretted later. He read a great deal on his own, and it was largely through reading Christian books that he came to faith as a teenager.
His own account of his conversion, quoted at length in The Life of Rev. Richard Baxter, is honest about his doubts. For a long time he worried because he couldn't trace the Spirit's work in him in the order the books described. He came to rest in the plain fact that he loved God and wanted to please Him.
From his youth he was also ill. He suffered from a cough, bleeding and other troubles for most of his life, and he expected to die young. That expectation shaped everything about the way he preached.
Kidderminster
Baxter was ordained in about 1638 and served for a short time at Bridgnorth. In 1641, at twenty-six, he was called to Kidderminster. The town was rough and largely careless about religion. When he began, he said, there were only a few families in a street who worshiped God at home.
He preached twice every Sunday before the Civil War and once a week on Thursdays besides. He looked on preaching as a matter of life and death, and in his own words he learned:
doing all in bodily weakness, as a dying man, my soul was the more easily brought to seriousness, and to preach as a dying man to dying men; for drowsy formality does but stupify the hearers and rock them asleep.
The Life of Rev. Richard Baxter, Chapter III: His Labors, Trials, and Success at Kidderminster
But Baxter is remembered most for what he did between Sundays. With his assistant he met with every family in the parish in turn, two days a week, to teach them the catechism and talk with each person about his soul. Over the years the town filled with praying households. The church had to be enlarged. On Sunday evenings, it was said, you could walk down a street and hear families singing psalms and repeating the sermon together.
His ministry there was broken by the English Civil War. He served for a time as a chaplain in the Parliamentary army, hoping to steady the soldiers, and then fell gravely ill in 1647. While he was too weak to work, he wrote the book that made his name.
The Saints' Everlasting Rest
The Saints' Everlasting Rest came out in 1650. Baxter wrote most of it, he said, with no book but a Bible and a concordance, as a man who thought he was dying and wanted to set his heart on heaven. It describes the rest God has prepared for His people, warns of the loss of those who miss it, and teaches a practice of daily meditation on heaven. It became one of the most loved devotional books in English. He wrote in its preface:
The worth of everlasting rest is not felt, because it is not considered; it is forgotten because a thousand trifles are preferred before it.
The Saint's Everlasting Rest, The Preface
The Reformed Pastor
In 1656 the ministers of Worcestershire agreed together to catechize their people house by house, as Baxter had done. They set a day of fasting and asked him to preach. He was too ill to give the address, so he enlarged it into a book, Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor. Its text is Paul's charge to the elders at Ephesus in Acts 20:28, and its first word to ministers is to look to their own souls before they look to anyone else's:
We must study as hard how to live well as how to preach well.
Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor, Chapter I: The Text Explained, and Taking Heed to Ourselves
Pastors have read it ever since as a searching and humbling book.
A Call to the Unconverted
Baxter also wrote for people who didn't yet believe. A Call to the Unconverted, published in 1658, is a long plea from Ezekiel 33:11, "Turn ye, turn ye... for why will ye die?" Baxter said it was blessed beyond all his books except The Saints' Rest, and he heard of whole households converted by it. It is included in our volume Making Light of Christ and Salvation.
Ejected and imprisoned
When King Charles II returned in 1660, Baxter went to London. He was made a royal chaplain and was offered the bishopric of Hereford, which he turned down. He worked hard for a settlement that would hold moderate Puritans and Anglicans together in one church, but it failed. In 1662 the Act of Uniformity required every minister to accept the Book of Common Prayer in full. Baxter would not, and like some two thousand other ministers he was put out of the Church of England. He never returned to Kidderminster as its pastor.
That same year he married Margaret Charlton, a much younger woman from a wealthy family who had been converted under his preaching. Their marriage was a happy one. She shared his troubles, once even joining him in prison, until her death in 1681.
For the rest of his life Baxter preached where he could, and he was arrested more than once. In 1685 he was tried before the harsh Judge George Jeffreys on a charge of libel against the church, and he spent about eighteen months in prison. Through it all he kept writing. The four parts of A Christian Directory, published in 1673, answer hundreds of practical questions about the Christian life at home, at work, at church and in public.
He died in London on December 8, 1691, at seventy-six. Near the end he wrote his Dying Thoughts on Paul's words, "to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better."
What he taught
Baxter was a Reformed Puritan, though he took his own line on some points and wrote at length to make peace between Christians who disagreed. He cared more about unity than about party. Three things run through all his books.
Heaven. He believed a Christian should set his heart on the rest to come, and that this would make him more useful on earth, not less.
Seriousness. Life is short and souls are eternal. Preach, pray and live as if that's true.
Practice. He wanted faith to show up in every part of life: in the home, at work, in trade, in the way you spend your time. Even his books about God, like The Divine Life, keep asking what difference a truth should make to the heart.
Why he's still read
Baxter wrote in plain, urgent English for ordinary people. He knew what it was to be sick, persecuted and misunderstood, and he never stopped pointing people to Christ and to heaven. Ministers keep coming back to The Reformed Pastor because it asks the questions they'd rather not ask themselves. Ordinary readers keep coming back to The Saints' Everlasting Rest because it makes heaven real.
Where to start
TheWay Library has fourteen of his books, all free to read. Start with The Saints' Everlasting Rest. If you're a pastor or church leader, read The Reformed Pastor next. For his life in his own words, read The Life of Rev. Richard Baxter. For something short, try his Dying Thoughts.
Our guide to Richard Baxter's books describes all fourteen, and our collection of Richard Baxter quotes gathers his best lines. For other writers of his age, see the best Puritan books. You'll find all his books on the Richard Baxter author page.