Ravenhill book still hot 50 years later

Until recently, this writer’s knowledge of the late Leonard Ravenhill was merely anecdotal. A pastor told of he and a buddy visiting Ravenhill’s home outside of Tyler in the late 1970s, hoping to glean some wisdom from the man with the pen of fire. They arrived and were invited in, only to be stunned by what they saw: There sat Ravenhill, the story goes, holding court with a couple of young musicians.

Instead of excusing themselves for a soft drink, the young students stayed and listened as Ravenhill explored the mysteries of God with a rising Christian artist named Keith Green, who was Ravenhill’s neighbor, and a tag-along friend named Bob Dylan.

A recent conversation with SBTC Executive Director Jim Richards brought Ravenhill to mind again. Back in his pastor days, Richards used to read Ravenhill’s “Why Revival Tarries” (Bethany House Publishers, 168 pages) annually.

“Our church didn’t always have revival, but I always had personal revival,” Richards said of his reading what Ravenhill’s friend A.W. Tozer called “a voice from above.”

Written in 1959 and reprinted numerous times since, his lamentations over the culture of his day could be translated generally to our postmodern age. Sin is still sin, immorality is still the rule rather than the exception. Lost men are still blind. Saved men are still slumbering in creature comforts, on the path of least resistance, and of least spiritual yield, to Heaven.

The book is a collection of 20 essays on prayer and awakening aimed at preacher and layman alike and taken from Christian periodicals of the middle 20th century.

AGONIZERS WANTED

The seasoned saint will find few novel things in the book, but its jarring reminders, rebukes and exhortations were marvelously discomfiting to this needy soul. Repeatedly, Ravenhill refers to the truly praying kind as “agonizers.”

“Poverty-stricken as the Church is today in many things, she is most stricken here, in the place of prayer. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; 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.”

And in case the reader is feeling victorious for remembering to pray five minutes, Ravenhill writes: “This world hits the trail for hell with a speed that makes our fastest plane look like a tortoise; yet alas, few of us can remember the last time we missed our bed for a night of waiting upon God for a world-shaking revival.”

Several times, Ravenhill, a British evangelist who preached powerfully across the pond during World War II before moving his ministry to the United States (he died in 1994 at a ripe age), complains of a toxic materialism in the church of the 1950s, not unlike today or in Sodom in ancient days, with “pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness,” having our light snuffed out by the “bushel of business” or the “bed of idleness.”

He writes that America cannot fall “because she is already fallen! This goes for Britain, too!” In fact, Ravenhill laments in his day the declining numbers of those answering a call to preach in Britain; one wonders, with similar results today here, if America’s churches are empty European cathedrals in waiting.

He also decries, among other things, “hell’s broth” (alcohol), citing its deadly social and spiritual fruits, and lobotomization?a hot-button bio-ethical issue of the day.

“When enlightened men dehumanize other men in this fashion, it is time to stop and ask if the great Goddess of Science has not received too much veneration from men,” Ravenhill argued.

Replace lobotomy with human cloning and utilitarian ethic