In the late 70s and early 80s, Greg Reynolds was a clos­eted gay man in his 20s, work­ing as a cam­pus min­is­ter for an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion called the Inter­Var­sity Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship. Dur­ing these years, Greg strug­gled with his homo­sex­u­al­ity. He was over­whelmed by grief and saw no option other than to repress his desires for sex and love. In 1978, a mis­sion­ary friend gave Greg a 35 mm Pen­tax K1000 that she didn’t use:

‘I knew very lit­tle about pho­tog­ra­phy, but I loved tak­ing pic­tures. It wasn’t my inten­tion to doc­u­ment the Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal move­ment, but rather to take pho­tographs of the peo­ple and places that were impor­tant to me. Now I see that the cam­era allowed me to say in pic­tures what I could never say in words.

When ther­apy and prayer failed to change me into an enthu­si­as­tic het­ero­sex­ual, I came out as a gay man and resigned from the min­istry. Today, I am work­ing on turn­ing my Kodachromes into a photo book called Jesus Days. I just launched a Kick­starter, which you can sup­port here to help me bring this project to life. These pho­tos offer a unique per­spec­tive into the pecu­liar world of IVCF, which, at the time, boasted 500 affil­i­ated chap­ters on sec­u­lar col­leges and uni­ver­sity cam­puses across Amer­ica. I cap­tured my fel­low evan­gel­i­cals pray­ing and coun­sel­ing with stu­dents, lead­ing Bible stud­ies and group meet­ings, and engag­ing in mis­sions abroad. Here are a few pic­tures from my col­lec­tion.‘