Church of St Lawrence Jewry

St Lawrence Jewry is ‘the Church of the Corporation of London’. Situated right across from the Guildhall and quarters of the Lord Mayor (bottom photograph), this is the heart of the what was once the nation’s, if not the world’s, most powerful city, and certainly the richest. The embodied wealth and power which once occupied these pews is remarkable, the church being suitably elegant and richly furnished.

Earthly power and glory, however, are fleeting. Most of those powerful Lord Mayors are gone; the imperial grandees, absent; the City gents who trade in lucre nowadays absent from church with its ethical strictures and charitable admonishments.

The powerful Anglican Church which persecuted the puritans from 1662-1688 is now a toothless giant along with Pope and Pagan sitting outside Bunyan’s cave; cryptocurrencies and the Chinese Dragon are threatening to reduce the old City to an irrelevance. Only the gospel message, hopefully heard from that grandiose pulpit, can offer a dignity and glory to man which he could never acquire on his own; to be a co-heir with Christ and all His millions of followers is far better than being sole heir of much mammon, the principal potentate of an earthly glitter.