On a spring night in 2017, Aaron Reindel sought comfort at a statue of Jesus washing the feet of his disciple Peter. Reindel was studying at Dallas Theological Seminary to become a pastor and had visited the weathered bronze-cast figures on the school’s front lawn hundreds of times.
That night, sitting in his usual spot on a bench next to the statue, Reindel wrote a prayer in the notes app of his iPhone. “I know you’ve made me clean by your blood,” he wrote. “As I travel, I pick up dust and sweat and blood, and I need you to wash my feet.”
Reindel talked to God about a lot of things that semester. One of them was that he was gay. Wrestling with how to reconcile his faith and sexuality, he often felt broken, not good enough to be useful to God. He kept coming back to that statue — despite unfinished homework and skeptical looks from late-night campus police — to remind himself he wasn’t alone.
Now 31, Reindel has a husband who supports his dream of becoming a pastor in the United Methodist Church, a denomination that had, until recently, not allowed pastors in same-sex relationships.
That long-standing ban was overwhelmingly removed in a vote May 1 by delegates at the church’s General Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The vote came after a recent split in the church that resulted in the departure of about a quarter of the country’s 30,000 United Methodist congregations.
“There was a real weight that was relieved,” Reindel said after the vote. “There’s almost a sense of floating.”
‘Surrender’
Being gay wasn’t something people talked about in Newton, the small town in southeast Texas where Reindel lived as a teen in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He knew of only one out gay person there. Reindel talked about his sexuality with God and Googled whether homosexuality was a sin, coming to believe it was.
He first felt a call to ministry at age 14. He remembers thinking it strange because he wasn’t sure what he believed about the Bible and didn’t see being a gay pastor as an option. But he knew God would work things out.
Two years later, still wrestling with his faith and sexuality, Reindel went to a Baptist youth retreat. After a speaker shared his conversion experience, he invited the kids in the audience to come up to the stage and give their lives to Jesus.
Reindel stayed in his seat, but suddenly started to cry. The word “surrender” kept looping through his head, and he wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper. Life as a Christian wasn’t going to be easy, he thought. But if he could surrender to God, it would be all right.
He then committed to a life of celibacy, a life as a single gay Christian.
He would try to live under that commitment for as long as he could.
In college, his singleness was held up as an example for other gay Christians. Several closeted people came out to him, desperate for someone to listen to and guide them.
Behind the scenes, Reindel was depressed and burned out. “I saw myself as washed up, like I was broken, and there wasn’t going to be any fixing me,” he says. After his junior year in 2014, he took a year off school to try and put himself back together.
During that time, his mom died of a drug overdose after struggling for years with addiction. “It kind of felt like I got kicked while I was down,” he says. The rest of his time in college was “a dense fog of really, really complicated grief.”
Flogging Molly
In 2018, during his junior year at Dallas Theological Seminary, God’s prompting led Reindel to a concert that would change his life.
Reindel was offered free concert tickets two days in a row — first to Bon Iver (which he turned down so he wouldn’t have to “recover emotionally”) and then to Celtic punk band Flogging Molly. He took the second set of tickets, feeling like God was trying to tell him something.
On the dance floor at South Side Ballroom, Reindel caught Fern Sosa looking at him. They soon lost each other in the crowd, but both felt an instant attraction.
They ran into each other later that night in line to order drinks. Before long, they were kissing.
Reindel started to feel other people watching them. He’d never kissed anyone in public before, and he knew he was breaking his school’s rules. Panicked, he ducked under a nearby railing and ran away.
Sosa tracked Reindel down later that night in the venue. Reindel gave him his number, and they started texting the next day. Soon, they were dating.
“I was experiencing joy again for the first time in a very long time,” Reindel says.
Not long after meeting Sosa, Reindel decided to leave Dallas Theological Seminary. “The most important thing in my life that was happening to me was a sin to them,” he says.
When asked for comment on the school’s policies on LGBTQ students, a representative for Dallas Theological Seminary referred to its marriage and human sexuality policy, which calls for students to “resist the temptations of same-sex sexual attractions and refrain from any and all same-sex sexual acts or conduct.”
Looking for a church home
At a post-Easter brunch Reindel and Sosa host in their apartment building every year, a few dozen guests are gathered in a lounge where deviled eggs and chocolates are laid out across a table.
Reindel takes a break from introducing guests and topping off mimosas and joins a conversation about faith and queerness. One of his friends brings up a command in the Old Testament not to eat shellfish and asks Reindel about his approach to the Bible.
Reindel then mentions a part of Old Testament law in the Bible where God commands the Israelites to keep parapets, or protective railings, on their roofs. Back then, people would often sleep on their roofs on hot nights and could fall off while asleep.
We don’t need parapets today, Reindel says. Instead of taking the passage literally, he encourages his friends to consider its intent. God wants us to take care of ourselves and our loved ones — whether that’s through a rooftop railing in biblical times or a tire check on a parent’s minivan nowadays. We can learn a lot from the Bible, he says, without taking all of it literally.
Reindel’s views on the Bible have sometimes made it hard for him to find a church home. After he left seminary in 2018, he and Sosa church-hopped for a few years, struggling to find what they called a “unicorn church”: a place that believes in the Bible’s authority, but also affirms LGBTQ people.
In early 2021, they went for the first time to Uptown Church, a new United Methodist congregation that met in the House of Blues.
“We just felt it, before the music started, before we sat down,” Reindel said. “It just was this feeling of home.”
Uptown’s ministers encouraged Reindel to go back to seminary, telling him there was a place for him in the United Methodist Church, even if people in same-sex relationships weren’t allowed to be ordained. In 2022, Reindel enrolled at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology and began interning at Uptown. There, he and Sosa led a small group of couples.
One member of that group was Eddie Hahn, a gay man and son of a non-denominational pastor. After going through conversion therapy when he was younger, he says, he began using drugs and went through a period where he was unhoused. Like Reindel, he long believed he was broken.
Seeing Reindel — a gay man assured of his calling to ministry — helped Hahn heal a part of himself he didn’t know needed to be healed. “It changed everything for me,” says Hahn, now 46. He still keeps a copy of God and the Gay Christian, a book Reindel recommended to him, on his nightstand.
Sosa, 31, is proud of his husband’s ministry and his knowledge of the Bible. He jokingly calls Reindel his “full-time pastor,” his go-to person for questions about God. “He’s very good at finding that one part or several parts of Scripture that are able to thoroughly answer your question,” Sosa says. “I think he’ll be able to be a good example to those who feel like they don’t belong.”
The Rev. Elizabeth Moseley, one of the United Methodist ministers who encouraged Reindel to go back to seminary, said she was overjoyed to see her denomination remove its ban on LGBTQ pastors. “I’m very overwhelmed with gratitude when I think about the fact that now Aaron and people like him have just as much of a chance to live out their call into ministry within the United Methodist Church as anyone else.”
As part of his training, Reindel is working as a ministry associate at First United Methodist Church in downtown Dallas. He’s also set to receive his master’s in divinity this month from SMU. He and Sosa married in a small chapel in Edgewood, an hour outside Dallas, in 2022.
Reindel considers himself lucky to be part of what he calls a historic moment in the United Methodist Church.
“Not everyone who has felt called and who has been a queer person who wants to go into ministry has had the opportunity or has been able to do it with the full backing and love and support of their denomination,” he says. “To see it happening now, when I was anticipating it happening a year or several years into the future … just felt really special.”
Good enough
On a cold, sunny morning in April, a month before the historic church vote, Reindel squirmed in a plastic seat on a manicured lawn at First United Methodist Church. As kids laughed and bickered at recess next door, Reindel fidgeted with his hands and bounced a leg up and down. He didn’t get much sleep the night before, staying up till 2 a.m. to prepare for a roughly 15-minute sermon he would give that morning. He would be addressing clergy and staff members at First United, including his bosses and mentors.
This would be his first time preaching since he became affirming of his queer identity.
“I’m overwhelmed. To say I would feel intimidated is incredibly understated,” he started his sermon. His hands were shaking and he moved them in and out of his pockets. “For many years of my life, I wondered if I could ever be standing up here preaching at all.”
Reindel preached from John 13:1-17, which tells the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. He shared what he learned from years of praying next to that statue that depicts the story.
People who serve in ministry shouldn’t help others in an attempt to prove their worth to God, he said. The image of Jesus washing the feet of his disciple Peter is a reminder that God loves us in our grime and our mess — and we are good enough.
Reindel finished his sermon with a self-assured smile. The audience applauded, and he headed straight for Sosa, putting his arm around him without a word. The crowd began a hymn together, and Reindel’s hands slowly stopped shaking.
Joy Ashford covers faith and religion in North Texas for The Dallas Morning News through a partnership with Report for America.
