Richard Baxter - The Reformed Pastor (Foreword by Chad Van Dixhoorn): Updated and Abridged

Baxter well knew the cost and labor of providing individual instruction to every person under his pastoral care. He also knew the benefits that grew out of this costly practice and how those benefits motivated him to continue in the work. He now shares fifteen of those benefits with his fellow ministers.

Brethren, will you faithfully discharge the great duty that you have undertaken in personally catechizing and instructing everyone in your parishes who will submit to it? Because this is the chief business of the day, I must insist somewhat the longer on it. I will give you some further motives to persuade you to faithfulness in the undertaken work.

The Call to Private Instruction

The first reasons by which I will persuade you to this duty are taken from the benefits of it. When I consider what this work well managed is likely to produce, through the blessing of God, it makes my heart leap for joy. Truly, brethren, you have begun a most blessed work that your own consciences may rejoice in, your parishes rejoice in, and the nation rejoice in. Even the child that is yet unborn will rejoice in it. Indeed, for ought we know, thousands and millions may yet have cause to bless God when we have finished our course.

Though it is our business here to humble ourselves for the neglect of this duty for so long, as we have very great cause to do, yet the hopes of blessed success are so great in me that they are ready to turn it into a day of rejoicing. I bless the Lord that I have lived to see such a day as this and to be present at so solemn an engagement of so many servants of Christ to such a work. I bless the Lord that he has honored you to be the beginners and awakeners of the nation in this great work.

Because the work in hand is so pregnant with great advantages to the church, I will come down to the particular benefits that we may hope for. When you see the excellence of it, you will be more set on it and more reluctant by any negligence or failing to destroy or frustrate it. Certainly, he who has the true intentions of a minister will rejoice in the appearance of any further hopes of attaining his ends, and nothing can be more welcome to him than that which will further the very business of his life. I will show you that our present work is such, in these particulars.

Fifteen Benefits of Private Instruction

1.We cannot expect a more hopeful advantage for the conversion of many souls than private instruction. Oh, brethren, what a blow we may give the kingdom of darkness by the faithful and skillful managing of this work! If the saving of souls, of your neighbors souls, of many souls from everlasting misery is worth your labor, get up and be doing! If you are indeed coworkers with Christ (1 Cor. 3:9), then set to his work and do not neglect the souls for whom he died.

2.The second happy benefit of our work, if well managed, will be the most orderly building up of those who are converted and the establishing of them in the faith. It risks the whole work, or at least much hinders it, when we do not do it in the order that it must be done. How can you build if you do not first lay a good foundation? How can you put the capstone in place while the middle parts are neglected? The second order of Christian truths have such dependence on the first that they can never be well learned until the first are learned. Therefore, the most godly people in your congregations will find it worth their labor to learn the words of a catechism. If you would safely edify them and firmly establish them, be diligent in this work.

3.A third benefit that may be expected by the well managing of this work is that it will make our public preaching better understood and regarded. When you have acquainted the people with the principles, they will better understand all that you say. Once they are acquainted with the foundation, they will perceive what you drive at. This acquaintance prepares their minds and opens a way to their hearts. If you would not lose the benefit of your public labor, make sure that you are faithful in this private work.

4.When you have had the opportunity of a personal conference, you will come to be familiar with your people. The lack of this close engagement for those of us with very large parishes is a great impediment to the success of our labors. By our distance and unacquaintedness, slanderers and deceivers have the opportunity to possess our people with false conceptions of us that prejudice their minds against our doctrine. By this distance and strangeness, abundance of misunderstandings between ministers and their people develop. Besides that, familiarity itself tends to nurture those affections that may open their ears to further teaching. When we are familiar with them, they will be more encouraged to be open about their doubts, seek resolution, and deal freely with us. But when a minister does not know his people or is as strange to them as if he did not know them, it must be a great hindrance to his doing them any good.

5.By means of private instruction, we will come to be better acquainted with each persons spiritual state, and so we will better know how to watch over them and carry ourselves toward them ever after. We will know better how to preach to them when we know their disposition and their chief objections and thus what they most need to hear. We will better know how to lament for them and rejoice with them and how to pray for them to God. Just as he who will pray rightly for himself will know his own sores and the diseases of his own heart, so he that seeks to pray rightly for others should know their hearts as far as he may and is appropriate. If a man has the charge merely of sheep or cattle, he cannot well discharge his trust if he does not know them, along with their state and qualities. So it is with the master who will teach his students well and with parents who will rightly educate their children. So it is with us.

6.This acquaintance with our peoples state will better satisfy us in the administration of the sacraments. We will better understand how far each person is fit or unfit to receive them.

7.We will by this means be better enabled to help our people against their particular temptations. We will much better prevent their entertaining any particular errors or heresies or their falling into schism to the hazard of themselves and the church, for men will more freely open their thoughts and scruples to us. If they are infected already or inclined to any error or schism, they will be more ready to reveal it. Thus they may receive satisfaction before they are past curing. Familiarity with their teachers will encourage the people to open their doubts to them at any time.

8.One of the greatest benefits of our work is that it will better inform men of the true nature of the ministerial office or awaken them to a better understanding of it than is now usual. It is now too common for men to think that the work of the ministry is nothing more than to preach well, to baptize and administer the Lords Supper, and to visit the sick. For this reason the people will submit to no more than that, and too many ministers are negligently or willfully such strangers to their own calling that they will do no more than that. But I do not doubt that through the mercy of God, the restored practice of personal oversight will convince many ministers that this is as truly their work as that which they do now. It may awaken them to see that the ministry is another kind of business than too many excellent preachers take it to be.

9.Another singular benefit that we may hope for from the faithful performance of this work is that it will help our people better understand the nature of their duty toward their overseers and consequently to discharge it better. This would not matter if it were only for our sakes, but their own salvation is very much concerned in it. I am confident by sad experience that it is one of the main impediments to their happiness and to a true reformation of the church that the people do not understand what the work and power of a minister is and what their own duty toward them is. They commonly think that a minister has no more to do with them than to preach to them, visit them in sickness, and administer the sacraments. So if they hear him and receive the sacraments from him, they think that they owe him no further obedience and that he cannot require anything more of them. Little do they know that the minister is in the church as the schoolmaster is in his school, to teach and to take account of everyone individually, and that all Christians ordinarily must be disciples or students in some such school, for their good.