Leonard Ravenhill

Leonard Ravenhill (1907—1994)

Country of Origin

United Kingdom

Countries/Regions of Ministry

England
United States

Traditions

Pentecostal

Ministries

revivalist
author

Long before the birth of social media, the British-American author and revivalist Leonard Ravenhill was framing serious soundbites of truth that would have made great posts. A few of them:

The only reason we don’t have revival is because we are willing to live without it.

Men give advice; God gives guidance.

My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil’s Most-Wanted List.

Ravenhill’s unique talent for arresting people’s attention was honed for over thirty years in the towns and villages of his native England, where he began preaching soon after finishing his studies at a Methodist school, Cliff College. There, under the tutelage of the Holiness exponent Samuel Chadwick, Ravenhill's heart burned early to see genuine revival. He and his Irish wife, Martha, brought that passion across the Atlantic when they moved to Minneapolis in 1958, settling at Bethany College of Missions. The next year, when Bethany’s publishing arm released his first book, Why Revival Tarries, it shocked many in the Christian world. Take for example the very first paragraph:

The Cinderella of the church of today is the prayer meeting. This handmaid of the Lord is unloved and unwooed because she is not dripping with the pearls of intellectualism, nor glamorous with the silks of philosophy; neither is she enchanting with the tiara of psychology. She wears the homespuns of sincerity and humility and so is not afraid to kneel!

By page four he was declaring:

The ugly fact is that altar fires are either out or burning very low…. By our attitude to prayer we tell God that what was begun in the Spirit we can finish in the flesh. What church ever asks its candidating ministers what time they spend in prayer? Yet ministers who do not spend two hours a day in prayer are not worth a dime a dozen, degrees or no degrees.

Notably, he wrote these sentiments at the end of the 1950s—a decade viewed by many today as a high point in American evangelicalism. Ravenhill, unsurprisingly, was not impressed with full sanctuaries or flowery sermons. He craved only the fire of God that brought sinners to repentance and believers to holy living. He rankled more than a few clergy when he declared, “If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.”

A. W. Tozer, noted editor of The Alliance Witness magazine, which published many of Ravenhill’s short articles, wrote in his foreword to Why Revival Tarries:

Toward Leonard Ravenhill it is impossible to be neutral. His acquaintances are divided pretty neatly into two classes, those who love and admire him out of all proportion and those who hate him with perfect hatred. And what is true of the man is sure to be true of his books, of this book. The reader will either close its pages to seek a place of prayer or he will toss it away in anger, his heart closed to its warnings and appeals.

To the surprise of the Christian publishing establishment, the hard-hitting Why Revival Tarries sold more than a million copies.

Ravenhill told few anecdotes about his own ministry; he preferred to quote John Wesley, David Brainerd, Charles Finney, and E. M. Bounds. He crafted no long lectures on theology, Pentecostal or otherwise. Nevertheless, throughout the next three decades in the US, Ravenhill influenced a wide array of future Christian leaders. David Wilkerson, the young Assemblies of God pastor who dared to go meet New York City gangbangers and tell them about Jesus (resulting in the ministry we know today as Teen Challenge), said, “Leonard Ravenhill was one of the few men I have ever known who was a true prophet.”

Perhaps the most unusual linkage began in the 1980s when the aging Ravenhills moved to Lindale, Texas, and began teaching young adults at Last Days Ministries. This was the headquarters of firebrand singer/songwriter Keith Green, who called Ravenhill “Papa.” His serious passion for God was due in great measure to being mentored by the man with the British accent who was forty-six years older than he. The Ravenhills opened their home for Friday night prayer meetings that went on for hours. One participant named Mark Dance (now a Southern Baptist executive) remembers, “He prayed with so much intensity that I expected the carpet under his knees to catch on fire.”

In 1994, Ravenhill died of natural causes in his home in Garden Valley, Texas. He was interred not far from his friend, Green, where the etching on Ravenhill’s tombstone throws out one last challenge: “Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for”?

Dean Merrill