The Reformed Pastor (Foreword by Chad Van Dixhoorn) E-Book

Richard Baxter

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

An Updated and Abridged Edition of Richard Baxter's Classic Text  Originally written in 1656 and endorsed by generations of leading pastors as an essential book on the work of ministry, this abridged version of The Reformed Pastor presents the best of Richard Baxter's timeless advice in simple, modern language that's more accessible to a new generation of church leaders. In inspiring communications to his fellow ministers, Baxter challenged them to pursue teaching and personal pastoral ministry with an exceptional degree of faithfulness. His words were grounded in the apostle Paul's encouragement to the leaders in Ephesus to "take heed unto yourselves and all the flock." Baxter's advice remains relevant today as Christian leaders face both new and age-old challenges in ministry. With this updated, abridged version of The Reformed Pastor, editor Tim Cooper retains Baxter's passionate message in a modern, simplified style that speaks clearly to today's Christian leaders.

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“The Reformed Pastor, by the preeminent pastor-theologian of the Puritan era, Richard Baxter, is one of the first books I read on the Christian ministry. As a pastor, I need to read and reread this classic. Crossway and Tim Cooper have done a great service to the church in making this updated and abridged volume available to us. May God use this book to save and care for many souls through pastors in his church.”

Mark Jones, Pastor, Faith Vancouver Presbyterian Church; coauthor, A Puritan Theology

“In the history of pastoral life, certain books stand out as classics that must be read by anyone who is serious about this utterly vital sphere of the Christian world. One immediately thinks of the books on pastoralia by Gregory the Great or Martin Bucer. Among this select group is Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor. It can be a daunting read, for Baxter demands much of anyone who would seek to serve as a pastor to the souls of men and women and children. Daunting though it is, it is a must-read. For here we find not only a book that has influenced generations since it was first published but a work that sets forth the high calling of being a minister of the gospel. The latter is not in vogue today for a number of reasons, and to some extent we are reaping the fruit of our failure to highly prize pastoral leadership. May the reading of this new edition, rightly abridged, serve to rekindle among God’s people a prizing of the pastorate and a prayer for those who serve in it. May it be a key vehicle to help refocus the passions and goals and energies of those currently serving as shepherds of God’s people!”

Michael A. G. Haykin, Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality; Director, The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“The Reformed Pastor rightfully carries the description of a ‘classic work in pastoral ministry.’ John Wesley and C. H. Spurgeon both testified to its benefit in their lives and ministries, as have thousands of other pastors. Baxter scholar Tim Cooper has abridged Baxter’s lengthy work into a more manageable (yet no less powerful) charge to pastors. It is my joy to commend this book to the current generation of ministers, that by carefully taking heed to themselves first, they will be better prepared to take heed to the flock of God.”

Timothy K. Beougher, Associate Dean, Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Ministry; Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, Richard Baxter and Conversion

The Reformed Pastor

The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter

Updated and abridged by Tim Cooper

Foreword by Chad Van Dixhoorn

The Reformed Pastor: Updated and Abridged

Copyright © 2021 by Tim Cooper

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

This book was originally published by Richard Baxter in London, 1656. In this edition, that earlier work has been abridged and the English modernized. See the introduction for more about what the editor has updated in this edition.

The images in this book come from Dr. Williams’s Library in London. Used by permission.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible, though the English has been modernized by the editor, with some consulting of modern translations. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-7318-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7321-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7319-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7320-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baxter, Richard, 1615–1691, author. | Cooper, Tim, 1970–, other.

Title: The reformed pastor : updated and abridged / Richard Baxter, Tim Cooper ; foreword by Chad Van Dixhoorn.

Description: Updated and abridged edition. | Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022760 (print) | LCCN 2020022761 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433573187 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433573194 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433573200 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433573217 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Pastoral theology—Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC BV4009 .B3 2021 (print) | LCC BV4009 (ebook) | DDC 253—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022760

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022761

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-01-06 03:22:14 PM

Contents

Foreword

  Chad Van Dixhoorn

Introduction

1  Take Heed unto Yourselves

2  Take Heed unto All the Flock

3  The Ministerial Work

4  What a Subtle Enemy Is This Sin of Pride!

5  Many Things Sadly out of Order

6  Reasons Why You Should Take Heed unto All the Flock

7  The Greatest Benefits of Our Work

8  Many Difficulties We Will Find

9  Some May Object

10  The Best Directions I Can Give

Appendix 1: The Catechism

Appendix 2: Book Outline

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

Of all the Puritan books that have cried out for abridgment, none has done so more loudly than Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor.

Every pastor, not just Reformed pastors, ought to read what Richard Baxter has to say about ministry. In fact, I have never mentored an intern or taught a class on pastoral ministry in which I have not assigned some parts of Baxter’s book for reading and discussion. But it has always been some parts. I think I am right in saying that I have never assigned the book as a whole. I have always required reading some of this and some of that, for Baxter is not consistently helpful, and he repeats some of the best bits more than once. He wrote a passionate appeal for shepherds to care for their sheep, but like many great pastors, he could not be both passionate and concise at the same time.

The main theme of TheReformed Pastor is the Christian minister’s need for a personal pastoral ministry. In Baxter’s England there were lonely people, sick people, and complicated families. There were Christians facing sin and suffering who lacked the assurance that they should have had. And there were churchgoers with a strong sense of assurance that they should not have had. Some of these people could be reached through powerful preaching. But not all of them. Thus, Baxter emphasized personal pastoral care for its own sake: a divinely appointed means, practiced by the apostle Paul himself (Acts 20:20), to bless the people God has placed in a minister’s life. Not to give it all away, but Baxter’s recipe for personal care includes praying, teaching, risking awkward questions, and insisting on hard conversations.

Baxter is most famous for his commitment to visitation. Visitation is a dying art in our day, but it need not die out altogether. Raising the topic of visiting families or individuals in a modern church is likely to raise eyebrows for most elders: “You want to visit every family in the church once a year?” It raises heart rates when elders in cooperatively shaped ministries discover that their pastor wants them to try it too: “You want me to join you on a visit?” And then, “Now you want me to do this by myself?” Of course, visitation is scary for members too: “Why does the pastor want to visit me? What did we do? Does he know?”

I remember trying to get traction with pastoral visits. I asked the secretary to set up meetings: her communications were ignored. I sent long emails with biblical explanations of why I’d like to visit: I’m not sure they were even read. I asked people after worship services if I could come by some evening to visit: panic and embarrassment. Then I started emailing a mixed group of people in the church (the alleged “problems” and the alleged “successes” in the same email) offering dates when I’d be available and telling them all I’d like to come and pray with them: success! The trial and error was painful for everyone but worth it, and I would never have persevered if it were not for reading Baxter and being persuaded by his driving concern that shepherds spend time with their flocks, that physicians of souls check in on their patients, that pastors plan visits with their people.

For what it is worth, Baxter did not press for private ministry because he was a poor preacher. As the wonderful introduction to this volume relates, there were points when Baxter’s church was full to the point of bursting. But like any godly minister, he was wise enough to know that personal pastoral care enhances a public ministry. Knowledge of one’s flock and of one’s neighborhood enables the preacher to shape and apply sermons with maximal effectiveness. What is more, hearers notice when a minister is so committed to them that he will leave the security of his study and venture into the messiness of their lives. People are more likely to listen to people who love them—and who take pains to prove it.

Many Christians have wanted an abbreviated version of Baxter’s classic. Tim Cooper finally took it into his hands, and he is the perfect person to do so. The introduction to this volume speaks for itself, but as an award-winning teacher, thoughtful Christian, and Puritan scholar, Professor Cooper has few rivals when it comes to Baxter. He has followed Baxter’s footsteps by coediting the great man’s autobiography.1 He has so engaged the pastor of Kidderminster’s theological and practical writings that he is able, if I may use the phrase, to think his thoughts after him. Dr. Cooper is the guide we have wanted, and the Christian world owes him a debt for this service.

In assigning sections of Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, I always felt like I was coming to the text with a cleaver, butchering the book by assigning chunks here and there. Dr. Cooper has approached his task with a surgeon’s knife, giving the book the slimmer look that some volumes need. In this case, when sewn back together, the effect is impressive. But the improvements include supplements too, such as introductions to chapters, questions for reflection, headings for orientation, and Baxter’s own catechism as a guide to pastoral care.

Even though he admitted that it was longer than it needed to be, the Reformed pastor who first told me to read TheReformed Pastor also told me to read the whole thing. He was not unkind; he simply noted my personal deficits and knew that I would need every practical encouragement that Baxter (or anyone else) had to offer. I confess that I eagerly look forward to gifting him a copy of this expert abridgment. He now trains pastors himself, and my guess is that he now assigns to his students only the best selections of Baxter. I am also guessing that he, like me, will be happy to commend this fine abridgment instead.

Chad Van Dixhoorn

Westminster Theological Seminary

1  Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. N. H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Thomas Charlton, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Introduction

When Richard Baxter published The Reformed Pastor in 1656, he had no idea that he had produced a classic text, one that would still be in print nearly four centuries later. The book was his exposition of Acts 20:28: “Take heed unto yourselves and all the flock, over which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he has purchased with his own blood.” His enduring work sets forth a vision of what pastoral ministry should be in all its rounded fullness. It summons pastors to tenacious, intentional, and sacrificial soul care of every individual under their oversight. The call is demanding and provoking, inspiring and affirming. If there is any one book that every pastor should read, this is it.

But be warned: it is no easy book to read. Partly that comes from Baxter’s message, one that is uncompromising in its high call and expectations. Reading The Reformed Pastor is an uncomfortable experience, and in this abridgment I have made no attempt to soften that discomfort. In several other ways, though, I have tried to make the book a great deal easier to read, mainly by modernizing much of Baxter’s seventeenth-century language and by reducing its length from 160,000 words to 30,000 words.1 It is possible that in this concentrated form, Baxter’s message is only more excruciatingly intense, focused, and demanding. The easier it is to access, perhaps, the more uncomfortable his book becomes.

I have, then, tried to make The Reformed Pastor much more easily accessible without diluting its force. It comes to us from a distant age; Baxter’s words and vision may still carry that sense of foreignness. For exactly this reason, he can speak what we need to hear. His text, now centuries old, can expose the gaps in our own conception of what it means to be a pastor. We do not need to agree with everything he says, but long after his life came to a close, Baxter still speaks. More than ever before, his is a voice we need to hear.

Baxter’s Voice in His Context

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) was an English pastor and a prolific author: The Reformed Pastor is just one of around 140 books that he wrote. On December 4, 1655, he planned to gather with his fellow pastors in the county of Worcestershire to commit themselves to a new way of ministry. As it happens, he could not attend. Dogged by ill health throughout his life, he found this to be just one more occasion when infirmity hindered his travel. Yet his preparations were not without fruit. It was his way to write out his thoughts in full, not only to do the best job he could of serving his fellow local ministers but also to share his ideas more broadly, with an eye to possible publication (he always sought to wring the greatest possible benefit from his work). And so it was. In the summer of 1656, The Reformed Pastor made its first appearance.

At that point, Baxter was in the middle of a flourishing pastoral ministry. But if we go back to April 1641, when he first arrived in Kidderminster at the age of twenty-five, the conditions did not bode well. Kidderminster was a town that had long been known for its weaving and cloth industry. It lay on the banks of the River Stour in the Midlands, about 130 miles northwest of London and around 40 miles from the border of Wales. Baxter’s parish comprised the town itself along with twenty villages in the nearby surrounds, with a combined population of between three and four thousand souls. A parish is what formed the basic administrative district of the Church of England, which comprised around nine thousand parishes. When Baxter first settled in his new parish, England was drifting ever more rapidly toward civil war between Parliamentarians and Royalists. Four years of armed conflict on British soil began in October 1642, the outcome of rising tensions over constitutional powers, individual liberties, taxation, and, above all, religion. King Charles I sponsored a church style that emphasized deference and order, favored the sacraments over preaching, and unsettled a previous consensus that was broadly Calvinist in its doctrine. These changes tended to bring the Church of England closer in practice and doctrine to the church of Rome. For many, this was too close for comfort. Would England see the Protestant Reformation through to its conclusion, or would that cause go backward?

We might ponder for a moment that word reformation and its companion reformed, which anchors the book’s title. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various reformations took place across Europe. For all the differences between them, the general aim was to re-form the church. For the most part, this meant bringing the church back to its initial shape in the time of the apostles as laid out in the pages of the New Testament and laying aside the worship and governance of the church that had become only ever more elaborate and even further removed from scriptural precedent across the intervening centuries. Therefore, a reformed church was one that resembled that first original. A “reformed pastor” was one who likewise followed the New Testament precedent. We might use the later language of “revival,” which implies not just faithfulness to the scriptural model but a lively, energetic, sincere, and heartfelt minister and ministry. For Baxter, all this meant imitating the example that the apostle Paul laid out in his last speech to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:18–35. Baxter’s point is implicit but obvious: any reformation of the church must begin with a reformation of its pastors.

There was little reformation to be seen in Kidderminster in 1641 and little prospect of it. How that changed! The war took Baxter out of Kidderminster for several years, but after he returned in May 1647, now aged thirty-one, he once again set about his work in earnest. When he began, only about one family on each street comprised faithful, godly Christians. By the late 1650s, Baxter classed around a third of the adult population as consenting church members and visibly sincere Christians. Among the eight hundred families in the parish, he explained in a letter in 1658, six hundred adults were consenting church members. At first he numbered his converts “as jewels,” but he quickly began to lose count, and five galleries (forming a second tier of seating layered above the first) had to be added to the parish church to accommodate his growing Sunday morning congregation.2 This remarkable turnaround says much about Baxter’s commitment, skill, and tenacity as a pastor. It is worth saying that he was unmarried. He believed it preferable for ministers to remain single so that they could devote themselves wholly to the work of ministry (see chap. 5). He eventually married Margaret Charlton, one of his parishioners, but only in September 1662, after he had been ejected from public ministry; they never had children.3 Thus Baxter threw everything he had into the cause.

Promising signs had emerged by March 1653, when, as Baxter explained in a letter to a friend, he considered himself to be “in the very beginning of a reformation.”4 He was starting to see clearly the kinds of structures needed to bring about a renewal of orthodox, scriptural, practical, sincere, and dedicated Christianity, and he was beginning to put those structures into practice. In doing so, he was taking advantage of a new environment. Since the execution of King Charles I in January 1649, England had ceased to be a monarchy. It was now a republic (or commonwealth) with power residing in the parliament and council of state. Oliver Cromwell, a member of the council of state and, from 1654, Lord Protector, became increasingly influential. More important, the Church of England had been legally (if not entirely in practice) disestablished. Parliament could not agree on any national ecclesiastical settlement to take its place, so the 1650s offered unprecedented freedom to experiment at the local level.

Baxter was a great experimenter. In his parish he matched effective preaching with the conscientious practice of confirmation (ensuring that those coming of age adequately understood and owned the Christian faith) and church discipline (based on Matt. 18:15–17, the process of bringing known sinners to repentance and, in the absence of repentance, excluding them from the church community). More widely, Baxter engineered the Worcestershire Association, a local network of like-minded ministers seeking to implement effective pastoral practice. They gathered together once a month to encourage each other, to discuss difficult issues, and to embody unity and concord at a time of division even among committed Christians. In 1653, and in their name, Baxter published Christian Concord: Or the Agreement of the Associated Pastors and Churches of Worcestershire. It declared their public resolution to perform the work of pastoral ministry and to undertake effective church discipline. Only those who consented to come under that discipline would be subject to it—that is, only those who intentionally adopted membership in the parish church and who declared their assent to the profession of faith incorporated in Christian Concord. This implied a direct conversation between the pastor and each consenting member of the parish, which meshed nicely with the fundamental resolve that “each minister should endeavor to know (if possible) each person in his charge.”5

This public declaration in Christian Concord made no mention of a practice that Baxter began to implement around the same time. He was inspired by the apostle Paul, who taught both “publicly” and “from house to house” (Acts 20:20), but he had long been deterred by the sheer labor involved. How did one pastor possibly find time to meet individually with every person in a parish the size of Kidderminster? Baxter found a way. First, he employed an assistant. Second, they each took all Monday and Tuesday every week to spend one hour with each family in the parish going through a catechism to gauge their understanding and practice of the faith. This catechism was a brief document of fundamental questions and answers designed to be easily memorized (see appendix 1 for Baxter’s catechism, along with two suggestions for contemporary catechisms).

It is important not to underestimate the cost. He took a full two days out of each busy week to do this work. Touchingly, he later described how the very poorest families of the parish would come to him for instruction, leaving a “plentiful” supply of lice to inhabit his chamber “for a competent space of time.”6 His new system demanded dedicated, painstaking, careful work. Preaching, he discovered, was not enough to bring about the reformation he sought. It also required these one-on-one, individually tailored conversations. But the work paid off. Baxter felt he had hit on the decisive method to bring about a true reformation. As he declared in his preface to The Reformed Pastor, “We never took the best course to demolish the kingdom of darkness till now.”7

In this way, Baxter pursued a reformation at Kidderminster from the ground up. Genuinely excited by the results, he glimpsed the potential of a countrywide movement that would see his method replicated thousands of times over in England’s many parishes. He began to pursue this national vision with his fellow ministers in Worcestershire. That gathering in December 1655 was his opportunity to persuade a receptive audience to join him in this new work and commit themselves to the practice of annual family visitations. In 1656, they declared their commitment (and published the brief catechism they would use) in The Agreement of Diverse Ministers of Christ in the County of Worcestershire for Catechizing and Personal Instruction. When Baxter published The Reformed Pastor that same year, it was his invitation to England’s ministers to follow suit. As his confidence rose, he allowed himself to imagine a reformed England populated with reformed parishes overseen by many thousands of reformed pastors.

But it was not to be. Oliver Cromwell died in September 1658. The rule of his son Richard collapsed in May 1659, and the country slipped into chaos. A year later, the monarchy was restored, along with the bishops. The terms required for ministry in the restored Church of England were so narrowly defined that around two thousand ministers could not in good conscience comply. The bishop of Worcester refused Baxter permission to preach in Kidderminster ever again or even to offer a public farewell to his beloved parishioners. By 1662, Baxter’s optimism had collapsed in the dust of bitter disappointment and reversal. Many years later, in 1684, he admitted that all these events had “made so deep a wound in my heart, as never will be fully healed in this world.”8The Reformed Pastor, therefore, emerges from a context of excitement and optimism that ended all too soon. But it was written by a man who, if nothing else, had certainly put his own advice into practice—and to great effect.

Baxter’s Voice in Our Context

All that history is important because it locates Baxter in a particular time and place, facing very real difficulties and obstacles. He was clearly a pastor who thought deeply about his ministry and was prepared to work hard to be effective in it. Yet his context could scarcely be more different from our own. In his day, people rarely moved or traveled. Most remained within the same parish their whole life. There was by definition only one church in each parish, so people had precious little choice about which church they attended. Back then, it was much easier to know exactly who was a consenting member of each parish and who was not. In our day, in contrast, people are nothing if not mobile. Each Sunday morning they might drive past ten or twenty churches to reach the one that best meets their needs or suits their preferences. They choose from a bewildering array of alternatives, and if they come to dislike the church they are in, they can easily move on to another one just around the corner. This makes it challenging for us to match the practical way that Baxter set about his vision of pastoral ministry.

There is also another crucial difference. These days, churches generally do not use anything like a catechism for intentional, individual instruction. Discipleship tends to be practiced in small groups, without the direct involvement of the pastor. Having read Baxter’s prescription, we might ask ourselves if we have lost something important. Is it time we recovered the catechism or something like it?

Yet for all the substantial differences, Baxter’s text remains powerfully relevant. Church members still require individual