Wealth & Money Quote by Dwight L. Moody

Moody doesn’t politely recommend church; he administers it. By comparing attendance to a transfusion, he turns an optional habit into an emergency intervention: miss Sunday, and you’re not just “busy,” you’re anemic. The metaphor is blunt on purpose. Blood is intimate, non-negotiable, and life-sustaining; it collapses the gap between spiritual drift and physical death. That’s Moody’s revivalist genius: he makes the invisible feel clinically urgent.

The specific intent is behavioral. He’s not defending church as an institution so much as positioning it as a delivery system for spiritual vitality. “Disciple” matters here: not a casual believer, but someone under discipline, formation, and accountability. Attendance becomes proof of allegiance and a practical technology of faith, the place where conviction gets recharged through preaching, hymn-singing, and communal pressure.

The subtext carries a subtle rebuke to privatized religion. If faith is merely internal, then church is a nice add-on; Moody argues the opposite. The sick man can’t will himself well. He needs an external infusion, administered repeatedly, from a source stronger than himself. That image also flatters the church as the blood bank of grace: organized, stocked, necessary.

Context sharpens the pitch. Moody preached in an industrializing, urbanizing America where mobility, work schedules, and new entertainments competed with the pew. He built mass revival campaigns that depended on turnout, routine, and collective momentum. The transfusion metaphor is motivational medicine for a modern world: faith, like the body, survives on circulation.