I missed this article by R. Scott Clark (Reformed) last February.
Despite the confidence with which those in the R&R (revival and revivalism) tradition speak about revivals, the truth is that there is typically little to show for them. Those of us in the confessional Reformation traditions would look at church attendance as an expected fruit of revivals but there is no evidence of increased church attendance after the First Great Awakening. In fact, attendance dropped. The genius of the so-called Great Awakenings is that, for the most part, they divorced religion and piety from the church, a pattern which American evangelicals have continued. Graham, Carl Henry, and Harold Ockenga, who pioneered the post-WWII “neo-evangelical” movement, intentionally marginalized the visible church as they sought unity among evangelicals around a high doctrine of Scripture. Sister Aimee held huge rallies before WWII and Billy Graham held a “revival” in LA in 1949, but to what effect? Yes, the Lord used those things to bring people to Christ but for all the “magic and noise” (H. L. Mencken), things in LA, London, and elsewhere soon returned to normal.