Richard Baxter (1615–1691): A Model of Pastoral Leadership for Evangelism and Church Growth -- By: Timothy K. Beougher

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 06:4 (Winter 2002)
Article: Richard Baxter (1615–1691): A Model of Pastoral Leadership for Evangelism and Church Growth
Author: Timothy K. Beougher


Richard Baxter (1615–1691):
A Model of Pastoral Leadership for
Evangelism and Church Growth

Timothy K. Beougher

Timothy K. Beougher is Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 1996. Dr. Beougher coedited Accounts of Campus Revival and Evangelism for a Changing World, and is the author of several scholarly articles. He is currently at work on a biography of Richard Baxter.

Introduction

In his autobiography, nineteenth century preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon records a conversation he had with his wife one Sunday evening: “I fear I have not been as faithful in my preaching today as I should have been; I have not been as much in earnest after poor souls as God would have me be.. .. Go, dear, to the study, and fetch down Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, and read some of it to me; perhaps that will quicken my sluggish heart.”1

Spurgeon was not the only one helped by the seventeenth century British Puritan’s writings. Baxter has been called the greatest of all English preachers, the virtual creator of popular Christian literature, and “the most successful preacher and winner of souls and nurturer of won souls that England has ever had.”2 Who was this man? What does he have to say to us today?

Dr. William Bates, who preached Baxter’s funeral message, recognized the difficulty of summarizing the life of this man:

I am sensible that in speaking of him I shall be under a double disadvantage: for those who perfectly knew him will be apt to think my account of him to be short and defective, an imperfect shadow of his resplendent virtues; others, who were unacquainted with his extraordinary worth, will, from ignorance or envy, be inclined to think his just praises to be undue and excessive.3

And one biographer warns of trying to compress Baxter’s life into a few pages, saying, “Men of his size should not be drawn in miniature.”4

Early Life

Richard Baxter was born November 12, 1615, at Rowton, a village in Shropshire, England.5 It was his destiny to live and minister throughout most of the seventeenth century, a watershed in English history. Before his death in 1691, he would witness the English Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the persecution of Nonconformity, the Great Ejection...

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