The Secret Place of Leonard Ravenhill

Leonard Ravenhill was born on June 18, 1907 in Leeds, England, into a working class home where Scripture, hymn singing, and the fear of the Lord were woven into ordinary life. Yorkshire mills and chapel pews framed his early years, but it was the fire of the gospel that seized his heart as a young man. He studied at Cliff College in Derbyshire, a holiness and missions training center famed for field preaching and ceaseless prayer. There he sat under the searching ministry of Samuel Chadwick, whose teaching on the Holy Spirit and on the prayer life branded him for all his days. Cliff College did not merely give him lessons. It gave him a pattern for life. Students rose early for private prayer, fasted together, trekked into villages to preach in markets and on street corners, and then returned to their rooms to plead for God to visit the land in power. The young Yorkshire evangelist learned to measure a day not by its comfort but by its consecration.

By the 1930s and 1940s Ravenhill was conducting evangelistic campaigns throughout the British Isles. He specialized in places where churches were thin and hope was thinner, open spaces where a wooden platform and a harmonium would have to do. His preaching was vivid, prophetic, and unadorned, always finding its way to the cross, always calling people to repentance and to the narrow way of holiness. He refused to flatter. He refused to confuse crowds with cleverness. Even as wartime austerity and postwar weariness chilled the nation, he insisted that the gospel is not an idea to be admired but a summons to be obeyed. Nights of prayer were as regular as nights of preaching. The pattern of his life was already set. He would proclaim Christ until the last person left the ground, and then he would walk the lanes and pray until the burden lifted.

In the 1950s Ravenhill emigrated to the United States, carrying the same message and the same habits. He preached in churches and tabernacles, among students and pastors, wherever there were ears to hear. In 1959 Bethany House published Why Revival Tarries, a book that distilled his convictions about holiness and prayer. It came with a foreword by A. W. Tozer, who recognized in the Yorkshire evangelist a prophetic voice for a prayerless generation. The book thundered with lines that have never gone silent. "No man is greater than his prayer life." "The Cinderella of the church of today is the prayer meeting." The sentences were not crafted to be quotable. They were struck white hot in the furnace of intercession and then hammered into exhortations that could awaken a sleeping church. Through the 1960s and 1970s Ravenhill became a spiritual father to many leaders, urging them to rebuild the altar of secret prayer. In his later years he settled near Lindale, Texas, where weekly prayer meetings in his home drew pastors, missionaries, and young musicians hungry for God. He prayed more than he published, and yet his few books traveled the world because they carried the weight of a life hidden with Christ in God.

He lived simply. He guarded his mornings for Scripture and intercession, his afternoons for correspondence and counsel, and his evenings for meetings of prayer or proclamation. Visitors remember not a famous man rehearsing his achievements but an older saint who would begin to talk of the majesty of Jesus and soon be on his knees. He spoke often of eternity and of judgment, not to breed fear but to purify motives. He never forgot the lessons of Cliff College or the searching eyes of Samuel Chadwick. He would rather miss a platform than miss an hour alone with God. On November 27, 1994, in Texas, he entered the presence of the Lord he had preached and pursued for a lifetime. Those who loved him did not recount statistics. They spoke of the atmosphere of prayer he carried and of the holy unease they felt around him when they were playing at discipleship. He had not built an empire. He had built altars.