Voices and influences
Richard Baxter
The town pastor who sat down with every family in his parish, one household at a time.
Summary
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- Lived 1615 to 1691, English.
Richard Baxter
- Lived
- 1615 to 1691
- Nation
- English
- Tradition
- Puritan
Own words
This site holds no quotation from Richard Baxter yet.
The life, in order
The life told as one accountfrom this site's record
Richard Baxter came to Kidderminster in 1641 as a young minister in a rough weaving town, and stayed long enough to change it. His method was not clever: he and his assistant worked through the parish register household by household, spending an hour with each family, roughly fourteen families a week, until they had covered some eight hundred homes a year. He wrote The Reformed Pastor to explain it to other ministers, and pastors have been reading it ever since. He was often ill and often expected to die, which is how The Saints' Everlasting Rest got written. When the Act of Uniformity came in 1662 he refused to conform and lost his living along with roughly two thousand other ministers. He kept writing anyway — around 140 books — and in 1685 an aging Baxter was hauled before Judge Jeffreys and jailed for eighteen months on a charge of libeling the church.