Leonard Ravenhill

Leonard Ravenhill was born on June 18, 1907, in Leeds, Yorkshire, into a working-class family that provided little religious instruction beyond nominal Anglican attendance. His early years were marked by spiritual hunger rather than satisfaction. At sixteen, while working as an apprentice plumber, he attended a Methodist revival meeting where he experienced what he would later describe as a genuine conversion. The encounter redirected everything. He abandoned his trade and enrolled at Cliff College, a Methodist holiness institution in Derbyshire known for training evangelists and revivalists.

At Cliff College, Ravenhill was shaped by the Wesleyan holiness tradition and its emphasis on personal sanctification, but his real education came through his discovery of the Puritan writers and the great revivalists of previous centuries. He read Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, George Whitefield, and John Wesley with the intensity of someone looking for a fire that had gone out in his own generation. After completing his studies, he married Martha, a fellow student, and together they began an itinerant evangelistic ministry across Britain. The early years were lean — they often slept in their car and lived on the hospitality of whoever would have them.

During World War II, Ravenhill pastored a small church in Bradford while continuing his evangelistic work. The war years deepened his conviction that Western Christianity had become comfortable with a form of godliness that lacked power. He saw around him churches that were doctrinally sound but spiritually dormant, and he began to develop the prophetic voice that would define his ministry. In 1959, he accepted an invitation to move to the United States, settling first in New York and later in Texas. The transition marked a shift from local pastoral work to a broader ministry of writing and speaking that would influence a generation of American evangelicals hungry for revival.

His Writing and Prophetic Ministry

Ravenhill began writing in the 1940s, but it was Why Revival Tarries, published in 1959, that established his reputation as a voice calling the church back to its knees. The book was a sustained indictment of what he saw as the prayerlessness of twentieth-century Christianity. "The church has many organizers," he wrote, "but few agonizers." The phrase became emblematic of his message: that the church had substituted programs for prayer, methods for miracles, and entertainment for encounter with God.

His subsequent works — Meat for Men, Sodom Had No Bible, and Revival God's Way among them — all circled the same central concern: that the Western church had lost the fear of God and, with it, any expectation of His manifest presence. Ravenhill's theological framework was thoroughly evangelical, but his spiritual reference points reached back to the mystics and the Puritans. He treasured the writings of Samuel Chadwick, E.M. Bounds, and Andrew Murray, men who had written about prayer with the authority of those who had prayed much and seen God answer.

Ravenhill's influence extended far beyond his books. His preaching was marked by an intensity that could be unsettling to comfortable congregations. He was not interested in church growth techniques or positive thinking. He preached about sin, judgment, and the necessity of brokenness before God with a directness that belonged to an earlier era of revivalism. His impact was particularly strong among young evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s who sensed that something vital was missing from the Christianity they had inherited.

He died on November 27, 1994, still calling for revival that never came, at least not on the scale he had prayed for and expected. His legacy lives on through his writings and through the testimonies of those who heard him preach and went away convinced that they had been in the presence of someone who actually believed what he was saying about God.

Who should read Ravenhill: Those who suspect that much of contemporary Christianity is too easy, too comfortable, and too distant from the God of Scripture. He is essential reading for anyone called to pastoral ministry who needs to understand what it means to agonize in prayer for the church. He is not for readers looking for encouragement about their spiritual progress or practical steps for Christian living. He is for those willing to be broken by the realization that they have never seriously sought God.