The Reformation was, potentially, a disaster for the clergy. Their central role, as mediators between God and humanity in the Mass, was, to a greater or lesser degree across Protestant Europe, removed in the theological changes of the sixteenth century. Indeed, as Andrew Pettegree has pointed out, it was by no means inevitable that a differentiated clergy should survive the Reformation. However much we will have cause to question the postulated ‘professionalisation’ of the clergy, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries undoubtedly saw a massive shift in clerical identities. Some of the themes explored in this chapter are elements in that transformation, others may be more specific to the English godly clergy. In a period when a status position is rising but not unquestioned, we should not be surprised to hear holders of that position making large claims for their function. We might ask if it was vocational insecurity that led John Rogers to claim that ‘The Office and Calling of the Ministery is of all others the most needful and necessary … The souls of the people depend on the Ministery; and where the Prophesie faileth, the people perish.’ In a more succinct phrase, he wrote, ‘the calling of the Ministry is a very painful calling’. It will emerge, as views of the calling are discussed, that the high claims for the ministry and equally high expectations are linked, and related to responses to Laudianism.

It is a truism to suggest that the ministry as conceived of by the godly focused on the act of preaching almost to the exclusion of all else.