Christ's Paralyzed Church X-Rayed

My confidence in mass evangelism is completely shattered. After twenty years of multi-million dollar crusades, both of the conventional type and the other with the healing emphasis, the nation is nearer spiritual bankruptcy, moral desolation, and social anarchy than ever before. This is of course not because of these crusades but in spite of them.

We have tried every crowd pulling gimmick we know. We have offered the perishing public a star studded platform of Czars from the sports and entertainment world as a “come-on” for the preacher's message. All of this has failed, completely and conspicuously. The nation blinked for a mere moment, turned over, and is now snoring in its sleep of death.

When the church gets a divorce from the world and worldliness, when we can ignore so-called Christian entertainers who attempt to combine Hollywood and holiness, when we cease from the strivings of the flesh and recognize that the Bible written yesterday is for today and for tomorrow, and that it and it alone has the formula for revival, we shall at least have started on the road to the reformation in the church which must precede the true spiritual awakening which alone can save our generation. It's Pentecost or holocaust, revival fire or the fire of revolution! 

Three brethren have sent a letter to the President of these United States saying that we need a day of prayer for this calamity hour. Strange that these men, so wise in many ways, are so blind to the fact that we have had national days of prayer. There is one thing that must precede prayer and that is repentance. No president can call a nation to that. It would take a prophet fierce in the Holy anger of an outraged God to smite a nation so that it counts everything but loss to get the smile of that rejected God.


 — LEONARD RAVENHILL