Ray Comfort (born December 5 1949) is a New Zealand-born Christian. He started Living Waters Publications and The Way of the Master in Bellflower, California, and has written a number of books.
For many years, he served as an itinerant minister and associate pastor in his former hometown of Christchurch, teaching around New Zealand and Australia. In the 1970s, he began open-air preaching, which he has since done several thousand times. Around 1981–1982, he started using the principles of what he calls "Biblical Evangelism" (see below) after reading Charles Spurgeon and the New Testament books of Romans and Galatians.
According to Comfort, he has designed dozens of gospel tracts since the 1970s, leading to the tract ministry of Living Waters currently selling millions of tracts each year. In 1989 , he accepted an offer from Hosanna Chapel (of the Calvary Chapel fellowship) in Bellflower, California, to begin full-time ministry in the United States. Comfort has no theological degree and has had no formal training in theology.
Currently, Comfort lives with his wife Sue in Southern California, and they have three adult children. He has also written many books and is a regular platform speaker at Southern Baptist state conferences.
He believes that evangelisation is the main reason that the Christian Church exists and that many of the evangelistic methods used by the church over the last century have produced more false conversions to Christianity than true ones. The key component Comfort uses is the "Moral Law of God" (The Ten Commandments) to speak about evidence of sin in the lives of his listeners before presenting the gospel of Christ to them. (See Biblical Evangelism for more details.) His realization of this method led to him in the mid-1980s to formulate two sermons entitled "Hell's Best Kept Secret" and "True and False Conversions." Comfort has no theological degree and has had no formal training.
Ray Comfort believes there are millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants who have never been born again. They are Christian, he states, by profession but may have never found a place of Biblical repentance.
He currently continues in itinerant ministry as a preacher and speaker at many churches and evangelism seminars, including Worldview Weekend events. Ray also preaches most Saturday afternoons at Huntington Beach, California, with a mechanical gorilla named Link, which helps him to draw a crowd and argue against the theory of evolution.
As well as co-hosting Way of the Master Radio, he has been, together with Cameron, the co-host of The Way of the Master Television Show, since December 2003. The show has aired two thirteen-episode seasons, and is currently filming the third season, expected to air in the Fall of 2008.
Comfort has debated atheists, including at the 27th National Convention of American Atheists in Orlando, Florida on April 13 2001 (Good Friday) when Comfort debated Ron Barrier, the National Spokesperson for American Atheists. Despite the hostile crowd, Comfort later stated that "[t]hey laughed at my humor, and although there was unified mockery at some of the things that I said, I was able to go through the Ten Commandments, the fact of Judgment Day, the reality of Hell, the Cross, and the necessity of repentance, and no one stopped me."
On May 5, 2007 Comfort and Cameron participated in a televised debate with atheists Brian Sapient and his colleague and girlfriend, Kelly, of the Rational Response Squad, at Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan At issue was the existence of God, which Comfort stated he could prove scientifically, without relying on faith or the Bible. Nightline correspondent Martin Bashir served as moderator at the event.. No official winner was declared by the event producers due to business practices held by ABC, and the debate was edited in such a way as to present a mixed audience reaction, with support shown for both sides. Highlights included Cameron and Comfort repeatedly referencing the Ten Commandments and denouncing the theory of evolution; conversely, the RRS provided several counterarguments, in favor of atheism and biological science. While many atheists contended that Comfort violated the rules by talking about the Ten Commandments, Cameron later stated on Way of the Master Radio that the rules of the debate did not say that the Bible could never be referenced, but rather that Comfort simply had to come up with one argument that didn't reference the Bible or faith.
Comfort was scheduled to debate Biologist PZ Myers on intelligent design on 5 August 2008 on WDAY (AM). But this changed to a question and answer for Comfort on August 5th and Myers to respond on August 6th.
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