Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read The Reformed Pastor (selections) — Richard Baxter, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

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Reading 1 · Pastoral Self-Examination

Preach to Yourself First

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), “The Oversight of Ourselves”: what it is to take heed to ourselves; public CCEL transcription of a nineteenth-century edition

Baxter’s 1655 sermon for the Worcestershire pastors begins with the shepherd himself: be sure saving grace is at work in your own soul, keep your graces lively, do not let your life contradict your preaching, do not live in the sins you condemn, and labor to be fit for the work. God never saved anyone for being a preacher.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Preach to Yourself First: Baxter on the Pastor’s Own Soul

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the opening charge of The Reformed Pastor, where Baxter tells ministers to take heed to themselves before they take heed to the flock

A CTS digest of the first part of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), “The Oversight of Ourselves,” on what it means to take heed to ourselves. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

The Reformed Pastor
Primary source
1655–1656
Richard Baxter

A word before you read. Richard Baxter (1615–1691) was an English Puritan pastor. His book The Reformed Pastor is one of the most loved books on ministry ever written in English. One warning about the title: “reformed” here does not mean “Calvinist.” It means renewed, revived, brought back to its proper work. Baxter wanted pastors whose own lives and labors had been reformed. This first reading turns the spotlight on the pastor himself.

1.A Sermon That Became a Book

In December 1655 the ministers of Worcestershire, in the English Midlands, agreed to meet at Worcester for a day of fasting and humiliation. They had just promised one another to begin a demanding new practice: to catechize, one family at a time, every household in their parishes that would come. Baxter, the leading figure of their circle, was asked to preach. His text was Paul’s farewell to the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20:28: “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock.” Illness kept him from the pulpit that day, so he expanded the sermon and published it in 1656. He gave it the Latin title Gildas Salvianus, after two ancient writers who had rebuked the clergy of their own times. The book keeps the voice of a preacher. Baxter speaks to “brethren,” he pleads, he confesses his own failures, and he presses every point to the conscience. He is not writing a manual of techniques. He is calling fellow ministers to repentance and to work. And he begins, as Paul did, with the words “take heed to yourselves.” Before he says anything about the flock, he examines the shepherd.

2.Who Was Richard Baxter?

Baxter was born in 1615 in Shropshire. He never attended a university, and he taught himself by reading widely. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1638, and in 1641 he went to Kidderminster, a market town of hand-loom weavers in Worcestershire, as its preacher. The English Civil War soon interrupted his work, and he served for a time as a chaplain in the Parliamentary army. He returned to Kidderminster in 1647 and stayed until 1661. Those fourteen years became famous. When he arrived, he later wrote, few families honored God at home. When he left, there were whole streets where almost every household prayed together. All this time Baxter was often sick, and he expected to die young. He worked, he said, as “a dying man to dying men.” He belonged to the Puritan movement, which wanted the Church of England purified according to Scripture. In church government he stood between Presbyterians and moderate Episcopalians, and he worked with anyone who preached the gospel. That is why the ministers around him could form the Worcestershire Association, a voluntary fellowship of pastors of different views who met to pray, to agree on discipline, and to help one another.

3.Grace Before Gifts

Baxter’s first caution is the most searching: “See that the work of saving grace be thoroughly wrought in your own souls.” A preacher may offer Christ to others and never receive him. He may warn others away from hell and still walk toward it. Baxter uses homely pictures. A tailor may go in rags while he makes fine clothes for others. A cook may scarcely lick his fingers after preparing a feast. Then comes his blunt conclusion: “God never saved any man for being a preacher, nor because he was an able preacher.” Salvation comes to those who are justified and sanctified by grace, and only then are they faithful in their Master’s work. Baxter knew how easily religious activity can disguise an empty heart. The unconverted minister knows the Bible, keeps holy duties, avoids open scandal and preaches holiness. Surely, he thinks, such a man must be holy. Baxter calls this “to perish in the midst of plenty.” The great danger of the church, he says, is to have “so many men become preachers before they are Christians.” For a seminary like CTS this is a sobering word. Theological study does not make anyone a Christian. A student must first know the Savior he will one day commend.

4.Theology at the Root of Learning

Baxter then turns aside to speak to schools and tutors, and his words still apply to every place that trains ministers. In the universities of his day, young men studied languages, logic and natural philosophy for years before they studied theology. Baxter thought this order was a “grand error.” All learning, he argued, should be learned in relation to God. Creatures separated from their Creator are like “broken syllables” that mean nothing on their own. Science is not unimportant. On the contrary, to study God’s works with reverence and love is “a most high and noble part of holiness.” But theology must lay the foundation and lead the way. Baxter also warns against a cold way of teaching the Bible, as if divinity were no more serious than “a lesson of music, or arithmetic.” He urges teachers to speak to the hearts of their students and not only to their heads, and to let “some piercing words” about God and the soul fall often from their lips. Students destined for the ministry, he reminds them, are being prepared to serve a God they must first know.

5.Keep the Fire Burning

Baxter’s second caution moves from conversion to daily life. It is not enough to be in a state of grace. A pastor must keep his graces “in vigorous and lively exercise,” and preach his sermons to himself before he preaches them to others. Here Baxter makes one of his most honest confessions: “When I let my heart grow cold, my preaching is cold.” He had noticed that when he grew cold, his hearers grew cold too, and even their prayers began to sound like his preaching. Pastors are “the nurses of Christ’s little ones.” If they stop eating, the children starve. So Baxter urges ministers to watch over their hearts, to guard against pride and worldly desires, and above all to be much in secret prayer and meditation. From there, he says, comes the heavenly fire that must kindle our sacrifices. He also gives a practical rule. Before going to the congregation, a minister should take special pains with his own heart. He might read some awakening book or meditate on the weight of his subject and the needs of his people, so that those who come cold to worship may leave with some warmth.

6.When the Life Contradicts the Sermon

The third and fourth cautions concern example. Baxter fears pastors who “unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues.” A minister may build up for an hour on Sunday and pull down with his hands all week. “One proud, surly, lordly word,” Baxter warns, can undo many sermons. He describes preachers who polish every phrase but give little thought to how they live, and he answers them with a balanced rule: “We must study as hard how to live well, as how to preach well.” His remedies are concrete. Maintain innocence and walk without offense. Be humble, meek and patient, and overcome hostile people with kindness rather than force. Be familiar with the poor, who easily take a pastor’s distance for contempt. Abound in charity. Visit the needy, care for body and soul together, and buy them a catechism and other small books. Then comes the fourth caution: do not live in the sins you condemn. Baxter echoes Paul in Romans 2: “Thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?” His summary is simple and memorable: “it is easier to chide at sin, than to overcome it.”

7.Fit for So Great a Work

Baxter’s final caution concerns the skills a pastor needs. The work is enormous. There are hard questions of doctrine, obscure texts, cases of conscience, subtle temptations and stubborn hearts. Even preaching requires holy skill: to make the truth plain, to let light into the conscience, and to suit everything to the capacity of the hearers. Baxter rejects the lazy excuse that the Spirit makes study unnecessary. That, he says, is to quench the Spirit and then claim the Spirit as the reason. His advice is four words long: “Study, and pray, and confer, and practice.” This charge has shaped pastors for more than three centuries. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of Victorian London, admired Baxter’s earnest evangelism. J. I. Packer, who wrote his Oxford doctoral thesis on Baxter, introduced a widely read modern reprint, and through such reprints the book has reached pastors in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, Baxter is read alongside the Westminster standards as a model of pastoral seriousness. A pastor today takes from this reading a simple order: first your own soul, then your example, then your skill, and all for the sake of the flock.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Baxter says God never saved anyone for being a preacher. How do you know that the grace you offer others is at work in you? When your heart grows cold, how does it show in your teaching or prayers? Is there one “proud, surly, lordly word” or habit in your life that may be undoing your sermons? And which of Baxter’s four means — study, prayer, conversation with others, practice — do you most neglect?

Select

Reading 2 · The Care of the Flock

The Manner and the Motives

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), “The Oversight of the Flock”: the manner of this oversight and the motives to it; public CCEL transcription of a nineteenth-century edition

Standing in the Puritan tradition of Perkins and Greenham, Baxter gives fifteen marks of faithful ministry: pure aims, hard study, first things first, plain speech, humility, tender love, patience, reverence, prayer and peace among pastors. Then he draws four motives from Acts 20:28, ending with the church bought by Christ’s own blood.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Manner and the Motives: How and Why Pastors Care for the Flock

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Baxter’s fifteen marks of faithful ministry and the four motives he draws from Acts 20:28

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), “The Oversight of the Flock,” the sections on the manner of this oversight and the motives to it. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

The Reformed Pastor
Primary source
Acts 20:28
Richard Baxter

A word before you read. In the first reading Baxter told pastors to watch over themselves. Now he turns to the flock. He has already described what the work includes: converting the unconverted, building up believers, family care, visiting the sick, and church discipline. In these sections he asks two further questions. In what spirit must this work be done? And why should we do it at all? His answers come from long experience in a busy town parish.

1.A Tradition of Faithful Shepherds

Baxter did not invent Puritan pastoral care. He inherited it. For two generations English Puritans had written about the work of the minister. William Perkins of Cambridge, in The Art of Prophesying (1592), taught preachers to explain a text, draw out its doctrine, and apply it plainly to the hearers. Richard Greenham, a village pastor near Cambridge, became famous for patient counsel to troubled consciences. Richard Bernard’s The Faithful Shepherd (1607) offered a full handbook for parish ministers. Behind them all stood the Reformers. John Calvin had organized Geneva so that pastors and elders visited homes before the Lord’s Supper, and Martin Bucer had written on the true care of souls. What Baxter added was a fresh urgency and a workable plan. In Worcestershire, ministers of different convictions had formed an association to agree on discipline and to support one another. Now, in 1655, they agreed to catechize every family. The Reformed Pastor was written to make that agreement stick. As you read the fifteen marks below, notice that Baxter speaks as one pastor to others. He includes himself in every warning, and he writes from inside the work, not from a study far away.

2.Pure Aims and Hard Labor

First, the work must be done “purely for God and the salvation of souls.” A wrong aim spoils even good work. Those who enter the ministry simply to earn a living, Baxter says, “have chosen a bad trade, though a good employment.” Self-denial is necessary for every Christian, but doubly so for a minister. Even hard study and excellent preaching, if done for the wrong reasons, become only “more glorious hypocritical sinning.” He quotes Bernard of Clairvaux, the medieval monk, on the motives of learning: some seek knowledge out of curiosity, some to sell it, some for reputation, but some to edify others, and that is praiseworthy. Second, the work must be done diligently. Pastors are fighting to save souls from ruin and to set up the kingdom of Christ. Such work cannot be done “with a careless mind, or a lazy hand.” Baxter’s advice to students is famous: “Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow.” Yet he presses harder still on the practice of what we know. He ends this point with a sentence of faith that every tired pastor needs: “No man was ever a loser by God.”

3.First Things First

Third, the work must be done prudently and in order. Milk comes before strong meat, and foundations before upper floors. People must be brought to faith before we can expect the fruits of faith. Conversion, repentance and faith in Christ must be taught “first and frequently and thoroughly.” Fourth, pastors must insist chiefly on the greatest and most certain truths. Baxter puts it beautifully: “If we can but teach Christ to our people, we shall teach them all.” He confesses that necessity has governed his own studies. It chooses which book he reads, which text he preaches and how he preaches it. Part of the reason was his constant illness and expectation of death, but he believes every healthy pastor should also make sure of necessary things first, because life is short for everyone. This means a preacher must often return to the same themes, “because the matters of necessity are few.” He should clothe old truths in fresh language, but he must not chase novelties to please hearers. Baxter observes that great volumes of controversy usually consist more of opinions than of necessary truths. A wise pastor knows his flock and gives them what they most need.

4.Plain, Humble and in Earnest

Fifth, teaching must be as plain as possible. “Truth loves the light,” Baxter writes, “and is most beautiful when most naked.” He compares obscure sermons to painted glass in a window, which keeps out the light. If you do not want to teach people, why are you in the pulpit? And if you do, why not speak so they can understand? A man who cannot explain a matter plainly has probably not digested it himself. Sixth, the work must be done with humility. A pastor should be ready to learn from anyone who can teach him. Pride, Baxter says, “feedeth all the rest of our sins” and causes the envy and quarreling among ministers. Even the title “minister” means servant. Seventh, there must be a wise mixture of severity and mildness, suited to each person and case. All mildness makes rebukes worthless; all severity makes the pastor look like a tyrant. Eighth, the work must be serious and earnest. Baxter wants preaching so plain that the most ignorant may understand, so serious that the deadest hearts may feel, and so convincing that objectors are silenced. “To speak slightly and coldly of heavenly things,” he warns, is nearly as bad as saying nothing at all.

5.Love, Patience, Reverence and Prayer

Ninth, all ministry must be carried on “in tender love to our people.” A pastor should feel toward them as a father toward his children, and even a mother’s love must not surpass his. When people see that their pastor truly loves them, “they will hear any thing and bear any thing” from him. Yet love does not wink at sin. Parents correct their children, and God disciplines every son he receives. Tenth, the work requires patience. Like a physician whose feverish patient insults him, the pastor must not abandon the cure because of hard words. Eleventh, the work must be done reverently, as before the face of God. Baxter dislikes preaching that aims to make people laugh like a stage play. Twelfth, it must be spiritual, drawing its proofs from Scripture rather than from philosophers. Thirteenth, pastors should long for success. A physician is not content to give medicine while every patient dies. A faithful minister may find comfort when fruit is lacking, but only if he truly wanted the fruit. Fourteenth, all depends on Christ. “He preacheth not heartily to his people,” Baxter writes, “that prayeth not earnestly for them.” If we do not prevail with God for them, we will not prevail with them for God.

6.Peacemakers Among the Pastors

The fifteenth mark concerns ministers together. They must be “very studious of union and communion” among themselves and work to heal divisions in the church. Baxter wrote after years of civil war and fierce religious quarrels, and he grieved that Lutherans, Calvinists and the English parties had treated one another as enemies. His remedy is to keep close to the simple Christian faith and to the sufficiency of Scripture. Pastors must learn to distinguish “necessaries and unnecessaries, catholic verities and private opinions,” and rest the church’s peace on the first. By “catholic” Baxter means universal, the faith held by all true Christians, not the Roman Catholic Church. He wants ministers to meet regularly, as the Worcestershire Association did, and he sees the proper use of synods as consultation and mutual help, “not to rule over one another.” Presbyterians will notice that their own churches give presbyteries and synods real authority, and many Reformed pastors have thought Baxter too loose here. Still, his spirit has much to teach. The pastor who refuses to break fellowship over lesser matters, while holding firmly to the gospel, follows Baxter’s best instinct. In a region like ours, where many churches work side by side, that instinct is badly needed.

7.Why Take Heed? Four Motives from the Text

Baxter draws four motives straight from Acts 20:28. First, we are overseers. A bishop’s title speaks more of labor than of honor; a pastor is “the guide of sinners to heaven,” leading Christ’s soldiers against a subtle, watchful enemy. We took this charge freely, and common honesty binds us to keep it. Baxter notes sadly that ministers quarrel over rank, but seldom over “who shall go first to a poor man’s cottage” to teach his family. Second, the Holy Spirit made us overseers, by giving gifts, guiding those who ordain, and fixing us in a particular charge. A call from heaven must not be disobeyed. Third, we oversee the church of God, the body of Christ, among whom angels minister. Fourth, it was bought with Christ’s own blood. Baxter quotes an ancient writer: if Christ had left just one spoonful of his blood in a fragile glass, how carefully we would guard it. Then he imagines Christ speaking to the careless pastor: “Did I die for these souls, and wilt not thou look after them?” A pastor today takes from this reading both a standard and a reason. The standard is fifteen marks of faithful work. The reason is the blood of Christ.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Which of Baxter’s fifteen marks is strongest in your ministry, and which is weakest? Do you preach the “matters of necessity” often enough, or do you chase novelty? Can your people see that you love them? When did you last go first to a poor family’s home to teach them? And when you look at your congregation, do you remember that Christ bought them with his own blood?

Select

Reading 3 · Humility and Repentance

Lying in the Dust

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), application, “The Use of Humiliation” (first part, excerpt); public CCEL transcription of a nineteenth-century edition

On a day of fasting and humiliation, Baxter first thanks God for England’s new generation of faithful ministers, then confesses their sins with his own name first: pride that writes and preaches our sermons, envy of other pastors, opinions defended like little popes, drowsy preaching, neglect of needy neighbors, and the love of money.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Lying in the Dust: Baxter’s Confession of the Pastors’ Sins

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the opening of Baxter’s “use of humiliation,” where he names pride, negligence and worldliness as the besetting sins of ministers

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), the application, “The Use of Humiliation” (the first part of the section, as excerpted for this course). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

The Reformed Pastor
Primary source
Pastoral repentance
Richard Baxter

A word before you read. Remember the setting. Baxter’s book grew out of a sermon for a day of fasting and humiliation, when the pastors of Worcestershire gathered to confess their failures before beginning a new work. This reading is his confession on behalf of them all, and he puts his own name first on the list. It is strong medicine. Read it slowly, and let it search you before you apply it to anyone else.

1.A Day of Humiliation

Days of fasting and humiliation were a regular part of Puritan church life. When a nation faced war or plague, or when a congregation began a new work, ministers and people set aside a day to confess sin, to pray, and to seek God’s help. Baxter opens on that note: “our business here this day is to humble our souls before the Lord.” He reasons that God will not help us in future duty unless he first humbles us for past sin. Sorrow alone does not guarantee change, but real change never comes without some sorrow. Then he points out a common double standard. Pastors labor to bring their people to tears of repentance while their own eyes stay dry. They behave as if their part is to call for repentance and the hearers’ part is to repent. Scripture shows another pattern. Ezra wept and confessed the sins of the priests as well as of the people, and Daniel confessed his own sin with the nation’s. Baxter says that any minister who compares his life with Paul’s charge in Acts 20 must be hard-hearted indeed if he does not “melt under a sense of his neglects.” Most pastors believe in confession. The question is whether “our hearts are not as orthodox as our heads.”

2.Thanksgiving Before Confession

Before he lists any sins, Baxter gives thanks. This tells us something about his spirit. England in the 1650s was governed by Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate after the Civil War. Committees had examined new ministers and removed many who were ignorant or scandalous, and a generation of earnest preachers was filling the pulpits. Baxter declares that England never had “so able and faithful a ministry since it was a nation.” He rejoices especially in the pastors of Worcestershire, whose brotherly fellowship he calls an “admirable mercy.” Some of his readers, who wanted bishops to govern the church, disliked the new ministers. Baxter answers that he would rejoice in their work even if he himself held their view of church government. Should he envy souls “the bread of life, because it is broken to them by a hand” that lacked a bishop’s approval? Here we see the catholic spirit of the Worcestershire Association. Pastors who differed on church order could still thank God for one another’s fruit. Only after this thanksgiving does Baxter turn to confession. He does so, he says, not to shame the office of minister, but to expose the sins of those who hold it.

3.Pride in the Study and the Pulpit

The first and worst sin is pride. Baxter calls it “a constant companion,” “a tyrannical commander,” and “a sly and subtle insinuating enemy.” It goes with ministers to the tailor and chooses their clothes. Worse, it goes with them into the study. It chooses the subject of the sermon and, more often, its words and ornaments. God commands us to be plain so the ignorant can understand, but pride brings out its “toys and trifles.” In a vivid image, pride “persuadeth us to paint the window, that it may dim the light.” When a passage is sharp and cutting, pride files off the edge. When God tells us to plead with sinners as for their lives, pride whispers, “Will you make people think you are mad?” Then it goes with us into the pulpit, shapes our tone, and makes us avoid what might displease. Finally it goes home with us after the sermon. It makes us more eager to know whether we were applauded than whether souls were helped. Baxter’s conclusion is frightening: “what pride makes, the devil makes.” The content of the sermon may be from God, but if its manner and aim are from pride, we have little reason to expect a blessing.

4.Envy and Little Popes

Pride also shows itself in envy. Baxter is ashamed to say it of godly ministers, but some resent the gifts of their brothers as if every compliment given to another were stolen from themselves. They hint at faults they cannot prove. Some refuse to let a more gifted preacher into their pulpits. In large towns that need several ministers, two pastors of equal ability can rarely work together in peace. Yet every Christian belongs to the one body of Christ, and every member benefits from the gifts of the others, as the foot benefits from the eye. Will a workman hate another for helping him with his master’s work? Pride also makes ministers treat their opinions as if they were God’s truth. “While we cry down papal infallibility,” Baxter writes, “too many of us would be popes ourselves.” When someone refutes their arguments, they feel personally attacked, and a famous name becomes a fortress for its owner’s mistakes. They expect drunkards and worldlings to receive blunt rebukes with thanks, yet they themselves can barely receive a gentle correction. Baxter does not condemn every minister. He thanks God for those who are “eminent for humility and meekness.” But he urges each pastor to search his own heart.

5.The Cure: Learning from the Lowly Christ

How can pride be overcome? Baxter first shows its true nature. Pride is the sin of devils, “the first-born of hell.” The gospel is designed to humble us, and grace begins and grows in humility. “Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature.” Christ calls his disciples to learn from him, for he is meek and lowly. Can we watch him wash his disciples’ feet and still be proud? Baxter turns this into a practical question: are pastors found more often in the houses of the wealthy than in the cottages of the poor? Then he takes away every ground of pride. Our bodies will soon be dust. Pride in our graces destroys them, since grace consists so much in humility. And if we know more than others, we should know better than anyone how little we know. In any case the devils know more than we do. A pastor’s task is to teach humility, and “a proud preacher of humility is at least a self-condemning man.” Baxter adds a warning for times of revival. When godliness is admired, pride may disguise itself as zeal. The fame of a godly man is as great a snare as the fame of a learned one.

6.Cold Preaching and Neglected Neighbors

The second great sin is negligence. Some ministers study only enough to produce sermons, and even then they gather “a few naked truths” without thinking how to press them on the heart. Many preach without life. “We speak so drowsily and so softly,” Baxter laments, “that sleepy sinners cannot hear.” He does not want constant shouting, which becomes ridiculous, but constant seriousness. Before going to the pulpit, a pastor must awaken his own heart, because “a sleepy preacher will hardly awaken drowsy sinners.” Baxter also asks for a familiar tone. A preacher should speak to the congregation as he would talk to one person, not like a schoolboy reciting a lesson. In preaching, he says, there is “a communion of souls”: light passes from our understanding to theirs, and warmth from our heart to theirs. Then he widens the view. A devoted pastor will care for the poor, neglected congregations around him. He will help them find able ministers and will sometimes go out to preach for conversion where there is no regular preaching. Here Baxter’s parish concern opens toward mission. The same love that seeks the next door must also seek the next village.

7.Worldliness and the Test of Charity

The third sin is love of worldly advantage. Baxter names ministers who always side with whatever party can reward them, and he notes how most clergy in every country follow the religion of their rulers. History would soon test his own words. In 1662, after the monarchy returned, the Act of Uniformity forced ministers to accept the restored Prayer Book and bishops. Baxter and about two thousand others refused and were ejected from their churches. Baxter also attacks the minister who avoids church discipline because it might cost him his income, and the minister who does little good with his money. Works of charity, he says, “do most powerfully remove prejudice” and open hearts to the gospel. He answers those who plead their families by explaining that 1 Timothy 5:8 speaks of present care, not of building up wealth for heirs. Children should be educated to earn an honest living, not left rich. He even wonders whether some ministers could serve better unmarried, though Reformed churches have never required this and Baxter himself later married. A pastor today takes from this reading a mirror. Pride, laziness and love of money remain the minister’s great dangers, and confession must begin with ourselves.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Where does pride go with you: into the study, into the pulpit, or home after the sermon? Are you glad when another preacher is more gifted or more praised than you? Is your heart as orthodox as your head? Are you found more often among the comfortable or among the poor? And when did you last confess your own failures in ministry before God, with the same seriousness you ask of your people?

Select

Reading 4 · Personal Catechizing

House by House

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), motives to the duty of personal catechizing, Article 1 (its benefits) and Article 2 (its difficulties); public CCEL transcription of a nineteenth-century edition

At Kidderminster Baxter and his colleagues met some 800 families one by one, two days every week. Here he lists what he hoped this would bring: conversions, firm foundations, better-understood sermons, pastors who know their people, a recovered view of the ministry, and blessing for future generations. He is also honest about the difficulties in pastors and people.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

House by House: The Blessings and Burdens of Personal Catechizing

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Baxter’s case for teaching every family one by one, with the benefits he hoped for and the difficulties he expected

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), the motives to the duty of personal catechizing: Article 1, drawn from its benefits, and Article 2, drawn from its difficulties. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

The Reformed Pastor
Primary source
Catechizing
Richard Baxter

A word before you read. To “catechize” means to teach the basic truths of the faith by questions and answers, usually from a short book called a catechism. In Baxter’s day this was mostly done with children in church. Baxter and his fellow pastors promised something bolder: to meet with every family of their parishes, adults included, in private. This reading gives his reasons. Notice how much joy, and how much realism, he brings to the task.

1.The Kidderminster Plan

Baxter opens with delight: the prospect of this work “makes my heart leap for joy.” He insists it is not a new invention but “the restoration of the ancient ministerial work.” He also describes how it worked in his own parish. Kidderminster had about 800 families. Baxter, an assistant, and a third minister at a nearby chapel set apart two whole days every week, from morning to night, for private instruction. Each family received a copy of a short catechism and was invited to come at an appointed time, usually to the minister’s house. There, for about an hour, the pastor listened as they recited, asked what they understood, explained the meaning, and spoke plainly to each person about his or her soul. With more than fifteen families a week, the ministers could see every household only once a year. Baxter admits the cost. His preaching had to be prepared in less time, and he felt the strain. But he would not give up the private work, “it is so great and necessary a work.” In his autobiography he later wrote that very few families refused to come. The Worcestershire Association published its agreement so that pastors throughout the county could follow the same plan.

2.A Hopeful Means of Conversion

The first benefit is conversion. Baxter explains that conversion has two parts: the mind must be informed of the essential truths, and the will must be changed by the power of those truths. Personal catechizing helps with both. A catechism fixes the sum of the faith in the memory. Some people mocked catechisms as empty forms, but Baxter answers that these “forms of sound words” are useful to everyone. Then personal conversation lets the pastor test what people understand and explain it. “These two conjoined,” he says, a set form and a plain explanation, accomplish more than either alone. Private conference also lets the pastor speak directly to each person’s need. Like the prophet Nathan, he can say to the sinner, “Thou art the man.” Baxter’s experience was that people who understand nothing in a sermon will understand a personal talk: “They will understand a familiar speech, who understand not a sermon.” The pastor hears their objections, finds where Satan has most hold on them, and can answer directly. Baxter says he seldom spoke seriously with anyone in private without seeing some sign of conviction. Then he pleads: if saving souls is worth your labor, “up and be doing!”

3.Building on a Firm Foundation

The second benefit is the orderly building up of believers. “Grace makes no leaps,” Baxter says, any more than nature. Later truths depend on earlier ones, and many Christians fall away because they were never settled in the basics. Even the godliest members will profit from learning the very words of a catechism. Third, catechizing makes public preaching better understood, because people now know the main points the preacher builds on. Fourth, it makes the pastor familiar with his people. Distance breeds misunderstanding, while familiarity opens hearts and encourages people to bring their doubts. Fifth, the pastor comes to know each person’s spiritual state, so he can preach, warn, comfort and pray more wisely. As a man who prays rightly for himself must know his own needs, so the pastor who prays for others should know theirs. Sixth, it helps with admission to the Lord’s Supper. In Reformed churches, ministers and elders were expected to guard the Table, examining those who came. Baxter argues that regular, friendly instruction of the whole parish is a better and less offensive way to know people’s readiness than a hurried examination just before Communion. Here a Presbyterian reader will recognize the work that elders still do in many churches.

4.Recovering the Whole Office

The seventh benefit may be the most important: catechizing will show what a minister really is. Many people thought a pastor’s job was only to preach, baptize, administer the Lord’s Supper and visit the sick. Many ministers thought the same. Baxter grieved over gifted preachers who had hundreds of people to whom they had never spoken a personal word about salvation. He hoped to live to see the day when neglecting “private personal oversight” would be thought as scandalous as preaching only once on Sunday. He offers comparisons. A schoolmaster must deal with each pupil, and a physician who only lectured on medicine would cure no one. He admits Protestants had overreacted against Roman confession to a priest. They rejected that practice, rightly in his view, but then abandoned all personal care. Eighth, the work will teach people their duty toward their pastors. When a minister invited them to be catechized, some asked by what authority he did it. Baxter answers that a pastor’s authority is only “a power to do our duty,” and that duty is for their good. It is like asking a man by what authority he puts out a fire in your house. The real obstacle, he says, is custom, and pastors created that custom.

5.Too Few Shepherds for So Many Sheep

Ninth, Baxter hopes the work will show the nation’s rulers how many more ministers are needed. In large towns one or two men served many thousands of souls. Baxter speaks of a “spiritual famine” in the cities, even where people thought themselves well supplied. Some ministers had parishes so large that, at his pace, they could visit every family only once in ten years. Meanwhile people died before anyone had spoken to them personally about their souls. Baxter believed rulers would provide more pastors if they saw ministers actually doing this work and saw it bear fruit. Tenth, the work will help future generations. Those who first break a bad custom must bear the people’s anger, but if this generation will “break the ice,” its successors will find people willing to be taught. Eleventh, it will strengthen family life and the Lord’s Day. Baxter wanted “masters of families” to examine their children and servants each Sunday, so that households would become little schools of faith. His world assumed that the father led the household. Today a Reformed pastor will encourage every parent, mother and father alike, and every guardian, to teach the faith at home, and will remember the many homes in which one parent carries this alone.

6.Blessings for the Pastor and the Land

Baxter lists more benefits. The work cures ministers of idleness and of wasting time in sport and gossip. It helps them fight their own sins, since it is hard to keep a sin you spend your days urging others to leave. Baxter thinks this active service does more for holiness than all the austerities of monks and hermits. It also draws pastors and people away from vain controversies, because they are busy with the fundamentals. Then Baxter speaks of the work’s scope. It is offered to every person in the parish, because the gospel commands us to preach Christ to every creature. Here he gives his own view that God is willing to save all who will believe, and that Christ “tasted death for every man.” Many Reformed theologians, John Owen among them, explained the extent of Christ’s death differently, and students should note the debate. Yet all agreed that the gospel must be offered freely to everyone. Finally Baxter hopes the practice will spread across England. He warns that many who prayed and fought for reformation wanted it to come from God or from Parliament, not through their own humble labor. True reformation, he says, must be wrought “by their own diligence and unwearied labors.”

7.Honest About the Difficulties

Baxter does not pretend the work is easy. He names difficulties in pastors first: laziness, a “man-pleasing disposition” that lets people perish rather than offend them, a “foolish bashfulness” about speaking plainly, concern for income, weak faith, and lack of skill. He even says that a good personal conversation with an unconverted person is as hard as preaching a sermon, if not harder. Then he names difficulties in people. Some will think themselves too good or too old to be catechized. Some are slow learners and will stay away out of shame. Some will not understand. Hardest of all is moving a hard heart, and even after a good beginning, people easily slide back. Only the Spirit can do the work. But the Spirit usually works through instruments suited to him, full of light, life and holiness. Baxter’s plan has lived on. Reformed and Presbyterian churches developed elders’ family visitation, and in the Netherlands regular home visits by elders became a church custom. Pastors in Latin America and Africa, often serving large congregations with few trained leaders, find Baxter’s situation close to their own. A pastor today takes from this reading a conviction: preaching is not enough. People must be known, taught and cared for one by one.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How many people in your congregation have you spoken with personally about their souls in the past year? Which of Baxter’s difficulties holds you back most: laziness, wanting to please people, bashfulness, or lack of skill? How could elders, deacons or trained members share this work with you? And what simple catechism or summary of the faith could you place in every home?

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Reading 5 · Answering the Objections

No Excuse for the Flock

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Gildas Salvianus, 1656), objections to personal instruction and Baxter’s answers, with the pattern of Acts 20; public CCEL transcription of a nineteenth-century edition

Baxter answers the excuses: we already preach in public, it leaves no time for study, it will ruin our health, God does not ask us to be drudges, the people will not come. His replies are sharp, and CTS adds Scripture’s counterweight on rest. He closes with Paul’s farewell in Acts 20, to be written on every study door.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

No Excuse for the Flock: Baxter Answers the Objections

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Baxter’s replies to pastors who resisted personal instruction, and his call to write Paul’s farewell in Acts 20 on every study door

A CTS digest of Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), the objections to the duty of personal instruction and Baxter’s answers, closing with the pattern of Acts 20. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

The Reformed Pastor
Primary source
Acts 20:17–35
Richard Baxter

A word before you read. Every new duty meets resistance, and Baxter knew the excuses his fellow ministers would offer. In this reading he lets the objections speak one by one and then answers each. Some of his answers are sharp, and some of his demands will seem extreme to modern readers. Read them as the words of a pastor who believed that eternity was at stake, and weigh them with Scripture and with wise counsel.

1.“We Already Teach Them in Public”

The first objection is simple: we preach to our people every week, so why must we also teach them one by one? Baxter replies with a question. You pray for them in public; must you not also pray for them in private? Paul taught “publicly, and from house to house,” night and day, with tears. Then Baxter appeals to experience, and his experience was humbling. After ten or twelve years of plain preaching, he found that many faithful hearers did not know basic truths. Some did not know that each person of the Trinity is God, or that Christ is both God and man, or what they must trust for pardon and salvation. Yet “in one hour’s familiar instruction” in private, the same people understood more than they had in their whole lives before. Any pastor who has sat down with church members and asked them simple questions about the gospel will recognize this discovery. Hearing sermons does not guarantee understanding. A second objection follows: not everyone in the parish is truly a member of the church, so why should the pastor labor for them? Baxter answers that every Christian, and above all every minister, is already bound to seek the salvation of others as far as he is able.

2.“It Will Leave No Time for Study”

Many of the ministers were young and wanted time to grow in learning. Baxter values learning, but he values souls more. Imagine a physician in a city struck by plague, he says, who turns away the dying because he must study “fermentation” and “the circulation of the blood.” Such a man is “a civil kind of murderer.” In the same way, souls can be saved without solving the fine points of scholastic debate about how God’s decrees and human free will relate. “Get well to heaven,” Baxter advises, “and help your people thither,” and you will understand all these things in a moment. He adds that practice brings a deeper kind of knowledge. You may know fewer things than others, but you will know the great things better. Baxter longed so much for knowledge of God that he would gladly exchange all his logic and metaphysics for “one glimpse more” of it. Then he gives a practical answer. Waste no time, and you will find room for both. Two days a week for personal instruction still leave four for study. And if ever the choice were truly one or the other, he says, “I would throw aside all the libraries in the world” rather than lose one soul.

3.Health, Rest and the Burning Candle

Another objection: this work will ruin our health and leave no time for rest or friends. A bow that is always bent will break. Baxter’s answer must be read with care. He was himself often ill, and he had found exercise necessary to his survival. He allows recreation, especially exercise for the body, but only as much as fits us for our work, the way a mower stops to sharpen his scythe. What he condemns is the pastor who spends whole days hunting, bowling or paying social visits while souls perish. “What is a candle made for, but to burn?” he asks. “He that worketh much, liveth much.” A life is measured by its work, not merely its length. These are stirring words, but a wise reader will balance them with the whole of Scripture. God gave the Sabbath as a gift of rest, and Jesus himself withdrew from the crowds to pray and invited his tired disciples to rest a while. Many modern pastors have damaged their health, their marriages and their ministries through overwork. What Baxter rightly attacks is self-indulgence that wastes time, not the rest that God commands. A pastor can burn steadily for many years only if he also rests in Christ.

4.Drudgery or Privilege?

Some ministers said God does not require them to “make drudges of themselves.” If they preach, visit the sick and do good when it comes their way, surely that is enough. Baxter’s answer is among his strongest. Would you stand by while sinners are dying and say God does not require you to be a drudge to save them? To call God’s service slavery is to slander God himself. Here he repeats his deep conviction: the chief misery of the church is that “so many are made ministers before they are Christians.” Christ forgot his meal to speak with one woman at a well, and some thought him out of his mind for his labors. Baxter then reverses the objection. The work is not a burden but a blessing to the one who does it. “He who is most in duty hath most of God.” Exercising grace makes it grow. Is it slavery to be more with God and to receive more from him? To those who say Paul’s times needed more zeal than theirs, Baxter answers that they must be shut up in their studies. Look around, he says, at the ignorance, presumption and misery of the people. Every faithful pastor finds work enough for the whole year.

5.“The People Will Not Come”

Two more objections remain. If we make the ministry so demanding, will anyone want to be a pastor? Baxter answers that Christ, not Baxter, set the standard, and Christ will provide servants who count this labor the happiest life in the world. Then the hardest objection: most people will not submit. They will say they are too old to go to school. Baxter grants that many are stubborn. But the worse they are, the more they need help. He also asks pastors whether their own coldness, distance or worldliness has made people unwilling. And he sets down a principle: “Offering it is our part, and accepting it is theirs.” If we offer and they refuse, we have done our duty. If some refuse, others will accept. The final objection asks why private talk should work when preaching has not, since faith comes by hearing. Baxter answers that personal conversation is itself preaching: “a man may as truly preach to one, as to a thousand.” Most of the preaching in the New Testament was conversation with one or a few, and Christ himself usually taught this way. And private talk improves public preaching, as a physician who understands the disease knows which medicine to give.

6.Write It on Your Study Doors

Baxter closes by returning to his text, Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders. He tells pastors to write it on their study doors in capital letters and lists its lessons: serving the Lord with humility and tears; taking heed to ourselves and to all the flock; preaching repentance toward God and faith in Christ; teaching publicly and “from house to house”; warning everyone night and day; keeping back nothing profitable; coveting no one’s silver or gold; not counting life dear; commending people to God in prayer; and being “pure from the blood of all men.” Two or three lines of this, well learned, would make us better preachers than years of lesser study. He recalls the motto he once carried on his flag in the Civil War: “He that saveth his life shall lose it.” His own life soon tested his words. In 1662 he was ejected from the Church of England with about two thousand others who refused the terms of the Act of Uniformity. He was never allowed to return to Kidderminster. He preached where he could, wrote constantly, and suffered fines and imprisonment. In 1685, already old and sick, he was tried before the harsh Judge Jeffreys and sent to prison. He died in London in December 1691.

7.Baxter’s Long Shadow

Baxter’s influence outlived the persecutions. In the eighteenth century Philip Doddridge and others read The Reformed Pastor as a model, and in the nineteenth Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher of London, admired Baxter’s passion for the lost. In the twentieth century J. I. Packer, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Baxter, introduced a modern reprint that brought the book to a new generation of evangelical and Reformed pastors. Baxter’s concern also reached beyond England. He corresponded with John Eliot, the Puritan missionary to the Algonquian peoples of Massachusetts, and Eliot translated Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted into their language. Today pastors in Latin America, Africa and Asia read Baxter, often in congregations that are large and growing faster than leaders can be trained. For them his question is urgent: how can every person be known and taught? A Reformed or Presbyterian answer will include elders and trained members who share the work, home groups that teach a catechism, and pastors who see conversation as preaching. A pastor today takes from this reading Baxter’s refusal to accept excuses. The flock belongs to Christ, and his shepherds must seek each sheep by name.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Which objection in this reading sounds most like your own excuses? If you sat with members of your church and asked them simple questions about the gospel, what might you discover? How do you balance Baxter’s “burning candle” with God’s gift of rest? And which line of Paul’s farewell in Acts 20 would you write on your own study door?

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Further Study: Four Public-Domain Works

These four works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All four are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

The Whole Treatise · Digital Text

1. The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter · 1656; CCEL digital edition

Read the parts of the treatise the textbook leaves out, in the digital text from which the textbook’s transcription was derived.

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A Printed Witness · Glasgow, 1835

2. The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter · 4th ed., Glasgow, 1835; Princeton Theological Commons scan

Compare a printed nineteenth-century edition with the digital text, page by page.

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As First Printed · 1656

3. Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter · 1656; facsimile

See the treatise as Baxter first printed it, under its full original title, and notice what the abridged editions, such as the textbook’s, shortened.

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Finding Your Way · Chapter Index

4. The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter · online chapter index (BibleHub)

Use the chapter index to find your way through the whole treatise and to see how its parts fit together.

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Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.