Richard was born in South Wales and was converted during the revival of 1858 to 1860. While a student at Haverfordwest Baptist College, he offered himself for service with the China Inland Mission but was advised to apply instead to the BMS. This he did, and in 1869 he was accepted for the small BMS mission in Shantung (Shandong) Province.
From 1870 to January 1875 he worked in Chefoo (Yantai), a coastal town served by three different missions. Richard, at this stage an admirer of James Hudson Taylor and his indigenous principles, felt that Chefoo was not a strategic location, and in 1875 he moved inland to Ch'ing-Chou-Fu, an important administrative capital and religious center. Here he adopted Chinese dress and distributed tracts and rudimentary medical aid. At Ch'ing-Chou-Fu, Richard's missionary principles took shape. He became convinced that the church in China must be self-supporting, and he argued that itinerant evangelism should be left largely to Chinese Christians. Missionaries should, rather, focus their attention on the key leaders of society, who in this context were the religious teachers and leaders of the reforming religious sects and the scholar-gentry who staffed the imperial civil service.
Richard was deeply affected by the devastating famine that struck Shantung and much of north China from 1876 to 1879. He was prominent in relief work, first in Chingchou, and then, from 1877, in Taiyuan, capital of Shansi Province. The catastrophe of the famine convinced Richard that only Western scientific expertise could avert similar disasters and that the right approach in China was to target the educated and religious elite with a message that yoked Christianity to the attractions of Western civilization.
Many of Richard's BMS colleagues and superiors now regarded his theology as too liberal and his strategic convictions as unfounded. He left Shansi in 1887 and for a time worked on a virtually freelance basis, in Peking (Beijing), Tsinan (Jinan), and from 1890, in Tientsin (Tianjin), where he edited a reforming newspaper. In 1891 the BMS seconded him to the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese, later the Christian Literature Society, of which he became secretary. At last free to pursue his distinctive vision of literary and educational work aimed at the intelligentsia. Richard influenced the Chinese national reform movement of 1897-1898, which promised much for Christianity until the reaction of the Boxer uprising of 1899-1900. The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 appeared for a time to vindicate his ideas. Ill, he retired in 1915 and died in London.