By Cindy Sutter

(Boulder) Camera/Associated Press

BOULDER, Colo.—His calling was clear to him, even as a young child.

Rev. Benjamin Reynolds played with action figures, but he wasn’t killing bad guys like most of his 6-year-old peers were.

“I would play with my GI Joes and my sister’s Barbie dolls. I’d make them be my church, and I’d preach to them,” he says.

Reynolds remembers listening carefully to sermons as a boy, fascinated with homiletics, the art of preparing and delivering a sermon. As he got older, he was nurtured in his church’s warm embrace, his gifts and interests encouraged.

“I grew up with respect from family and friends. (They believed), ‘This is what you were called to do.’ They served to protect it.”

Only a few years after preaching to plastic soldiers, at age 14, Reynolds gave his first sermon in front of his large African-American congregation, Emmanuel Missionary Baptist church in Colorado Springs. The title: “Real and True Christianity.”

It is a theme to which Reynolds has returned throughout his 31-year ministry, albeit not always in the way he expected. This summer, after resigning a senior pastorship of 16 years at the church where he gave his first sermon, he is serving as interim pastor at the Community United Church of Christ in Boulder.

After his early start preaching, Reynolds continued to study, eventually earning a master’s of divinity. He worked at a church in Dallas for several years before returning to Emmanuel. He helped lead the congregation to offer prison outreach, a scholarship program for graduating seniors and an HIV/AIDS ministry. He was head of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he made his church an open and affirming congregation for gay people. The latter action was controversial, since many members believed the move to be counter to the church’s doctrine.

Then, last year, Reynolds told church members he was gay. He resigned at the same time. The church then asked him to leave early, he says.

“They were surprised I had the nerve to tell them,” Reynolds says. “I served there as the pastor 16 years. I loved the people, and I still do. At that point it was not about them. For 16 years, it was about them. It was what I believed God had led me to do. It wasn’t even (about) me. I did what I felt was right.”

Still, it was painful. While some people supported him, they did so silently, he says.

Reynolds decided to seek what’s known as a privilege of call, in which he asked to begin a process to receive ordination by another denomination. It was during the process that he met Rev. Harriott Quin of the Boulder church. Quin, a retired pastor, serves on the Rocky Mountain Conference of the UCC, which considers requests such as Reynolds’.

“There was just so much about Benjamin that I resonated to,” Quin says. And then there was the timing: Pastor Pete Terpenning was planning a summer sabbatical, and the church was seeking an interim pastor. About two hours after meeting Quin, Reynolds says he was on the phone with Terpenning, being asked to interview for the interim job.

Reynolds was not looking for a preaching job. He is program director for Brothas4Ever, a community building group for African-American gay men, and is soon to begin a doctoral program at Iliff School of Theology, where he is coordinator of ministry studies.

Yet the Boulder church saw an opportunity to bring some needed diversity to its congregation, and Reynolds saw it as a way to preach regularly in an environment that accepted his sexual orientation.

He remembers particularly his interview with the church committee.

“(They) asked me if I would be bringing my partner with me to church,” he says. “I don’t have a partner. But I have never in my entire life heard the word partner and church together in a church session.”

He was deeply touched.

Quin says Reynolds and church members have felt particularly close during the “joys and concerns” part of the service in which people are free to talk about happy things and the problems that worry them in their lives, after which the pastor says a prayer incorporating what he has heard.

“I personally see him as a treasure,” Quin says of Reynolds. “He is very gifted in so many ways. …It’s a wonderful opportunity for our little church to have a little part of this man’s journey, a man of great faith…at a turning point in his life,” she says.