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… 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.” — A.W. Tozer, Foreword to Why Revival Tarries
Tozer knew what he was endorsing. Leonard Ravenhill (1907–1994) was a British evangelist who had spent years praying for revival in England before moving to America in 1950 — and growing more alarmed, not less. Why Revival Tarries, first published in 1959, is a compilation of articles Ravenhill had written for The Herald of His Coming, an interdenominational prayer magazine. Over a million copies have been sold worldwide.
Ravenhill’s argument is simple and relentless: the New Testament church was not the exception. It was the norm. Everything the early church was — its fire, its power, its world-shaking prayer, its willingness to pay any price — is what the church is supposed to be. The gap between that church and the church today is not inevitable. It is chosen. And the primary choice that created the gap is the abandonment of prayer.
Major Themes
1. The Prayer Meeting as Cinderella
“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!” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
The church has been seduced by everything prayer is not — intellectual respectability, organizational efficiency, mass evangelism — while the prayer meeting, unglamorous and demanding, has been quietly abandoned. The indictment scales up from the prayer meeting to the pastor:
“No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organisers, but few agonisers; many players and payers, few prayers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
2. Unction vs. Eloquence
The book’s most distinctive theological contribution is Ravenhill’s insistence on unction — the Holy Ghost fire that cannot be produced by training, personality, or scholarship, and without which all preaching is dead weight. The target here is not liberal theology but conservative evangelical ministry: the fully trained, doctrinally sound, organizationally competent preacher who has everything except fire.
“The tragedy of this late hour is that we have too many dead men in the pulpits giving out too many dead sermons to too many dead people.” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
Ravenhill’s charge is that correct doctrine without the Spirit is not a partial Christianity — it is a fraudulent one.
3. Preachers vs. Prophets
Tozer’s foreword frames Ravenhill himself as a prophet in the Elijah mode — “the man sent from God not to carry on the conventional work of the church, but to beard the priests of Baal on their own mountaintop.” The prophets Ravenhill calls for are not predictors but forthtellers: men consumed by God’s burden, willing to be hounded rather than heralded.
“Preachers make pulpits famous; prophets make prisons famous.” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
The prophetic chapter on John the Baptist is among the book’s finest: four hundred years of prophetic silence, and one man — God-fashioned, God-filled, God-fired — did in six months what an army of priests could not do in four centuries. The institutional church selects for pulpit-pleasers and produces none of the prophets.
4. Why Revival Tarries — The Specific Indictments
The chapter of that name is the book’s most diagnostic. Revival tarries because evangelism has been commercialized. Because “easy believeism” has cheapened the gospel:
“Such a sinning, repenting ‘easy believeism’ dishonours the blood and prostitutes the altar. We must alter the altar, for the altar is a place to die on.” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
Because preachers are afraid of naming false religion. Because the church steals God’s glory — the parade of personalities, radio programs, and big names that makes God incidental to his own work.
“The biggest single factor contributing to delayed Holy Ghost revival is this omission of soul travail.” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
Revival follows the kind of prayer that costs something — that involves the body, that bleeds, that refuses to let go. “Our accent is on paying, theirs was on praying. When we have paid, the place is taken; when they had prayed, the place was shaken!“
5. Dead Fundamentalism as the Real Problem
The book’s most surprising line identifies the enemy not as liberal theology or secularism but as orthodox Christianity without fire:
“God’s problem today is not Communism, nor yet Romanism, nor Liberalism, nor Modernism. God’s problem is — dead fundamentalism!” — Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries
The church that has all the correct doctrine, all the organizational machinery, all the evangelistic programs — and no Holy Ghost fire — is, in Ravenhill’s view, the deepest obstacle to revival. You cannot revive what has never lived.
Practical Applications
- Seek unction before every act of ministry. Ravenhill’s first chapter is a command: “With all thy getting, get unction.” Before preaching, teaching, or any ministry role, wait before God until the Holy Ghost fire comes. Preparation without unction produces dead sermons — the unction is the work.
- Reinstate the prayer meeting. Ravenhill’s diagnosis is that the church gives its best time, best speakers, and best promotion to everything except prayer. If you have any influence over a gathering, give the prayer meeting the prominence of the sermon — the best hour, the best preparation, your best presence.
- Practice soul travail. The prayer of the revival men was not casual or brief — it was extended, physically costly, often accompanied by fasting. Schedule weekly time for undistracted intercession that goes beyond daily devotion into genuine wrestling.
- Read the lives of men kindled by prayer. Ravenhill points throughout to David Brainerd’s diary, Wesley’s journals, and Whitefield’s biography. Read them not as history but as models — fire begets fire.
- Apply the unction test. Ask honestly: if the Holy Ghost were absent from your ministry today, what would be exactly the same? The activities that would continue unchanged are running on human power alone.
Lineage and Legacy
Ravenhill stands in the lineage of the Holiness movement: formed at Cliff College under Samuel Chadwick, deeply shaped by E.M. Bounds (The Weapon of Prayer is quoted throughout), and calling the church back to the prayer culture of Whitefield, Wesley, and Finney. The book’s great cloud of witnesses — David Brainerd, William Carey, Robert Murray McCheyne, Jonathan Edwards — are all men kindled by prayer, whose fires spread across continents. Ravenhill’s vision of revival is neither Pentecostal nor Reformed but squarely in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition: prayer as travail, repentance as genuine crisis, and the Holy Ghost as the non-negotiable condition of apostolic ministry.
A.W. Tozer’s endorsement was not incidental. The Pursuit of God (1948) and Why Revival Tarries (1959) represent two sides of the same burden: Tozer on the individual’s pursuit of God, Ravenhill on the corporate church’s failure to pursue him. Both books came out of the same alarm at mid-century American evangelicalism’s drift toward entertainment, success, and comfort.
David Wilkerson credited Ravenhill’s influence on his ministry. Keith Green — who was mentored by Ravenhill at Last Days Ministries in Garden Valley, Texas, where Ravenhill settled in 1978 — carried his fire into music. Mike Bickle and the Kansas City prayer movement drew on Ravenhill’s themes.
No direct connection between Ravenhill and the ministry of Brother Watchman Nee or Brother Witness Lee has been found. The theological emphases are genuinely distinct: Ravenhill’s focus is corporate revival, prophetic preaching, and the urgency of reaching the lost; the Lord’s Recovery’s primary concerns center on the organic union of the believer with the indwelling Christ and the building up of the church. The concerns are not contradictory but the frameworks differ.
Honest Assessment
What this book does well: Why Revival Tarries carries the force of a man who has earned the right — every accusation backed by a life of prayer, every comparison to the early church grounded in years of study and travail. The “organisers vs. agonisers” paragraph may be the most quoted passage in the literature of revival for good reason: it is precise, rhythmic, and devastating. The chapter on John the Baptist is among the finest prophetic writing in twentieth-century evangelicalism — one God-fashioned man doing in six months what four centuries of priests could not is the book’s best argument in its most concentrated form.
The book’s limitations:
The book was compiled from articles and reads that way — episodic, repetitive, and occasionally tangential. The Cold War context dates many sections: the repeated attacks on “Communism and Romanism” as twin threats feel very 1959. The tone is almost unrelentingly accusatory, with little of the grace and hope that would balance the diagnosis. Ravenhill’s rhetorical mode is the prophet who names the disease; he rarely stays long enough to describe the cure. The reader finishes the book convicted but not always instructed.
The prophetic posture Ravenhill models — severity of spirit, willingness to be hated, contempt for institutional accommodation — can be appropriated by people who confuse anger with anointing. The book has inspired genuine prayer movements; it has also been read by people who mistake a harsh spirit for spiritual authority.
For Chinese Christians specifically: much of Ravenhill’s polemic targets the comfortable, entertainment-oriented Western church. A Chinese Christian already familiar with persecution, underground worship, and prayer under pressure may find some of Ravenhill’s accusations beside the point — or may find that the book’s core diagnosis, stripped of its American context, lands with unexpected precision on different targets: the professionalization of ministry, the substitution of activity for prayer, the performance of Christianity without its fire.
Read This If…
Read this book if you are in Christian ministry or leadership, feel the gap between Acts and the present church and cannot make peace with it. It will not give you a program. It will trouble you until you pray.
Not suited for someone new to prayer or in a season of spiritual discouragement — the weight of accusation can crush rather than convict. Read Tozer’s The Pursuit of God alongside it to find the other side of the same longing.
The question Ravenhill leaves you with is his title. Why does revival tarry? His answer takes a whole book, but it can be said in one sentence: because we are willing to live without it. That indictment is harder to shake than anything else he wrote.