Most people who know Ray Comfort know him from a camera and a car park — stopping a stranger, asking a few questions, and watching the penny drop. What fewer people know is where he came from, and how close he came to never being a Christian at all.
A birth certificate that told a lie
He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 5 December 1949. His mother was Jewish. His father, in Ray’s own words, was a Gentile who was open to the things of God.
When he was born, his parents wrote “Methodist” on his birth certificate. Not because they were Methodists. His mother had lived through the war years and feared there might one day be another Hitler — and if there were, she did not want a piece of paper anywhere naming her son as a Jew.
That is the household he came from. Not a religious one. By his own account he went to church about three times in twenty years, and was given no religious instruction at all.
25 April 1972
He was twenty-two when he was converted. He gives the date plainly — 25 April 1972, in Christchurch.
Not raised into it. Not talked into it over years. A man with almost no church behind him, turning around at twenty-two.
Twelve years on a soapbox
He was ordained and pastored in Christchurch for three and a half years. But the part worth paying attention to is what he did alongside it.
He spent twelve years preaching in Christchurch’s Speaker’s Corner — the open air, no building, no invitation, no audience who had chosen to be there. Twelve years of hecklers.
That is where the method came from. Not a seminary. Not a book. Twelve years of standing in the open and finding out what actually works when the person in front of you does not want to hear it.
Around 1974 he started Living Waters, which began as nothing more than a free evangelistic newspaper with gospel tracts in it.
California, and the camera
In 1989 he joined the pastoral staff at Calvary Chapel in California — the same Calvary Chapel movement Chuck Smith started.
Later came The Way of the Master, co-hosted with the actor Kirk Cameron, teaching people how to share their faith and how to handle the hard questions.
Why we point people to him
Because his method starts where the Bible starts. He uses the Law — the Ten Commandments — to show a person what they already know about themselves, before he says a word about grace. You do not tell a man about a cure until he knows he is ill.
And because of who he was. A boy whose birth certificate was written to hide what he was, from a home with no faith in it, who ended up teaching hundreds of thousands of Christians how to open their mouths.
“Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” — Romans 3:19
Sources: Ray Comfort’s own autobiography, as cited in his Wikipedia entry; Living Waters; Faithlife.
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