Article By Candice Nixon // EEW Magazine // Marriage & Family

Pastor John Gray and his wife Aventer Gray were guests on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk, co-hosted by her daughter Willow and her mother Adrienne Banfield Norris.

During Wednesday’s episode of the Emmy-nominated Facebook series, Pastor Gray, 46, admitted that the Coronavirus pandemic and quarantine have heightened tensions in his marriage, and more than prayer is needed to resolve marital issues.

“The reason why this conversation is so impacting to me is because, as a man of faith, what sometimes happens with the theological construct is that we think that our Higher Power will somehow fix it all, and sometimes prayer is not enough,” he said as he sat next to Mrs. Gray, 38.

The South Carolina-based Relentless Church pastor, who was caught up in a cheating scandal last year, admitted to having an emotional affair with an unnamed mistress but denied the mistress’s story that the two were sexually intimate.

Since that time, the Grays, former stars of their now cancelled OWN docu-series, The Book of John Gray, have been working to rebuild and strengthen their union.

“You need to talk to somebody that has walked through things that you don’t know,” said Pastor Gray who will celebrate 10 years of marriage this year. “I needed this, because there’s some areas of unattended manhood that need to be addressed.”

The charismatic preacher whose reputation has taken quite a hit due to the scandal surrounding his marital indiscretions said, “I have been forced into intimacy over the last four weeks. And when Willow said, ‘You can’t spell divorce without COVID,’ what I think is that I don’t think people are wanting to divorce because of these four weeks. I think truth is being presented, and we’re finally revealing and being revealed for who we actually are. So there’s a distance between who we thought we were and who we actually were, and that’s where the tension is.”

A dual revealing, both publicly and privately, has forced Pastor Gray to face the truth head on, take ownership of his actions, and work hard to improve. Though strides have been made, on Red Table Talk, Mrs. Gray, mother of the couple’s two children, Theory Aspyn-Sky and John Gray IV, openly complained that her spouse still fails to see the woman behind the multiple roles she plays in his life.

“You see me as the wife. You see me as the mom. You see me as whatever it is you need me to fulfill at that moment,” she explained, adding, “I think that the hardship that comes in marriage is, the tension comes in because you have not reconciled that we singularly have so much value without all of the other titles that we wear.”

Despite their hardships, the Grays seem to be doing their best to make things work and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

During a 2019 appearance on daytime talk show The Real, Pastor Gray said, "Over a year ago, my wife and I were in a very difficult place in our marriage, and in that time, I began to converse with someone — other than a counselor, other than a pastoral leader, which is where I should have taken my issues and challenges.”

This time around, it looks like both he and Mrs. Gray are laying all their issues out on the (red) table rather than letting them fester, grow and destroy their family.

See the Grays’ full Red Table Talk discussion below: