When I first came to New York City in the late 1980s, I realized that I had not come to a normal part of the United States. I remember reading at the time a brief religious comparison of Manhattan and the rest of the country. 30% of Manhattan residents said they had "no religious preference" compared with (at the time) 6% of U.S. residents. 5% of Manhattanites attended any Protestant church at all, compared with 25% of Americans. I realized that New York City was, religiously and culturally, more like secular and very post-Christian Europe. So I began to search for preaching ideas from the great preachers I knew who had labored in London.

This post resumes the series on D.M. Lloyd-Jones' classic book Preaching and Preachers.

When Lloyd-Jones says that people still will come to hear preaching in our contemporary culture, he adds two qualifications—or you might say he has two underlying assumptions. He says: "The answer is that they will come, and that they do come... when it is true preaching. This may be slow work... it is a long-term policy."

Before Continuing with my series on Lloyd-Jones' book  Preaching and Preachers , the Following is based on a recent quiet time / devotional I had. We will resume the series in my next post.

In Preaching and Preachers, Dr Lloyd-Jones makes the case that the mainspring of the church's ministry should be Biblical preaching—preaching that expounds the meaning of the Biblical text in the assembled community.

Let's survey Lloyd-Jones's answers to the objections in his day to the ideas importance of preaching.

The Doctor points out how in Acts 6 the church faced crisis over the support of widows in the early church. The ministry of mercy to the needs of the poor in Their community was quite important and Necessary. But notice why the apostles put some new leaders over it. They did it So They Could Devote Themselves to "prayer and the ministry of the Word" (Acts 6:4). That was the primary thing, and That was what the apostles, the main leaders of the church, had to give Themselves to. The Doctor points to Jesus' own ministry, Especially to places where, under pressure to do more miracles, That says what I've came to do was preach Primarily (eg Mark 1:38). Jesus' miracles were wonderful-they Helped People with disease and suffering-yet reconciled people to God what was belief in the message and work of Jesus.