Frank Schaefer recalls the moment Tim came out to his parents as “a stab through our heart,” not because Tim was gay, but because he had been unsure he could confide in them and had struggled in private. Aware that one of his friends had been kicked out of the house after coming out, Tim had hoped to delay his own declaration until he was safely off to college. He told his parents only after a friend’s mother called them to report that he might be suicidal.

Frank Schaefer and his wife, Brigitte, told their son that they loved him and accepted him as he was, but there were fears, too. Would he be bullied? Would he get AIDS? What about grandchildren? And had they done something wrong?

Six years later, Tim’s decision to marry, shortly after college, was to be the next crisis, and when the moment came, father and son knew it.

“Who wouldn’t want their own family member to perform the ceremony; it’s so much more special,” Tim Schaefer said, explaining his decision to ask his father to officiate, despite the risks. “My only pastor, ever, had been my dad.”

Frank Schaefer recalls immediately accepting the offer, knowing the likely consequences.

“When he said, ‘Dad, will you perform my wedding?’ it was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “I was honored and overjoyed that he had asked me. It was only after I had hung up that I said, ‘What does this mean for me as a United Methodist minister?’ Gay marriage is a punishable offense, by trial and defrocking, so I expected to be fired.”

Frank Schaefer told his supervisors that he was officiating at the wedding in 2007, and nothing happened. He did not tell his congregation, but on Father’s Day in 2008, he gave a sermon on unconditional love in which he acknowledged that his son was gay. In the ensuing years, a group of congregants accused him of sexual misconduct and financial misconduct. When neither of those complaints was substantiated, one was filed accusing him of violating church law by performing Tim’s same-sex marriage.

By the time of the trial, last December, Tim Schaefer’s marriage was falling apart, which made his father’s defrocking doubly painful.