How can I erase/hide parts of an ellipse stroke that are "behind" an offset path of text?

[Chris_Paniagua]

Hi all.  I am new to illustrator.  I've searched the web and these forums and tried a number of different techniques, but have not had success.  see reference image:

I want the ellipse / stroke to trim or hide in the portion behind the grey, so that when I hide the grey text layers the circle has a padding from intersecting with the original white text.  *note the text and offset path have an effect of "arc lower" and are in their own group. 

How I arrived here:

1) Ellipse tool with stroke and zero fill

2) text tool

3) effects > warp > arc lower

4) create outlines from type

5) offset path

I appreciate any assistance!
Thank you

[Mylenium]

You have to expand the appearance and cut things up using Pathfinder operations.

Mylenium

[Chris_Paniagua]

expand the ellipse?  cut the ellipse with which pathfinder operations? 

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

What you can do: apply an opacity of 0% to only the grey fill.

Then group everything and in the transparency panel make a knockout group.

[Chris_Paniagua]

I tried moving the stroked ellipse to the group featuring the greyed outline text, it applied the same effect warp>arc lower to the circle.  Not good.

If I left the stoked ellipse out of the greyed outline group and tried to group - it gave me the error "can't make a group of objects" that are within different groups.

What am I missing? 

[Monika Gause]

You just need to group everything but the background..

[Chris_Paniagua]

that's what I needed.  Thank you!