The Ray Family Conversion Story

The Ray Family: "For Steve Ray, there was an answer to the question: 'Did the Church come before the Bible or did the Bible come before the Church?'

'We had always assumed that the Bible gave birth to the Church but realized, after some research, that was really a fallacy,' Steve Ray said. 'The Church was there. Jesus did not leave us with an authoritative Book, He left us with an authoritative Church and later, through time, that Church gave us an authoritative Book, but the Church came first.'

Steve Ray said they questioned the thinking of the early Church fathers, assuming they were Protestant in their theology and that 'the Catholics corrupted it all later on as the centuries went awry.'

To their amazement, they found that 'the early Church believed absolutely in the real presence of Christ in regeneration and baptism,' Steve Ray said. 'They believed in apostolic succession. They believed in the primacy of Rome. All these things that are essentially Catholic were already well established in the first, second and third centuries, and it kicked the foundation right out from under us.'

New Year's Eve 1993 was the turning point. The Rays spent the evening with friends with whom they ended up in theological discussions.

The couple spent the first day of 1994 reading and listening to tapes of conversion stories. By the end of that day, Steve Ray said, "I looked at Janet and I had tears in my eyes and I said, 'I'm Catholic."'