I'm going to try to set the record straight here on what really happened. I assisted Ray Franz for many years in page layout and technical support, including building his first website for him. Shipping physical books was hard on Ray after his stroke, and so we prepared a PDF version of Crisis of Conscience that could be sold online. I cobbled together a system that automatically emailed a link for a protected PDF file using a code to access it once payment had been made. Ray was very happy with this system because it required no labor and the few hundred dollar a month it generated helped supplement his meager retirement savings as well as allowed his work to be read in a format that may have been more appropriate for someone trying to keep evidence of their doubts hidden from family members still in the Witnesses.
Towards the end of his life, he had hoped to find someone who could take over the management of Commentary Press, his publishing imprint, but no viable candidates presented themselves. Upon his untimely death in 2010 from a gardening accident, I managed the website and made sure the funds were properly deposited into Cynthia's bank account, which was Ray's main hope even though no proper succession had been put in place. (By the way, I never took a penny for any help I provided.)
Debbie Dykstra was close to Cynthia and assisted her personally in many ways. But Debbie convinced Cynthia that she should manage Commentary Press, something myself and a few close associates of Ray's felt was inappropriate. We wanted to keep things as they were, where people could purchase e-versions of Ray's books and the money would continue into Cynthia's accounts. At Debbie and Cynthia's request, I turned over control of the domain name to her and soon after, she shut down the website that provided automatic fulfillment of Crisis of Conscience, claiming she would shortly replace it with something better.
Instead, it sat fallow for many years while she prepared a revised edition that incorporated her own story into the mix. Ray would not have approved of this in any way and as happy as I am that there is finally some version available again, I believe Debbie overstepped her bounds by trying to "improve" on Ray's last efforts and he would have been frustrated and saddened that she kept his last sanctioned revision of Crisis off the market for so many years. I offered to restore the previously functioning web store and to make sure all funds went to Debbie, but was rebuffed.
I can't pretend to know her motivation for this. Ray often complained of certain evangelical Christians wanting him to endorse some denomination of Christianity that they had embraced after leaving the Witnesses, but he refused, always pointing out that their agendas were distractions from cultivating a simple and personal relationship with God and Jesus. Ray's defense of a simple Christianity, that wherever "two or three were gathered" in Christ's name, there Christ was, seems to be the most reasonable and loving interpretation of that religion. Everything else was more about ego than about essence, he felt.
