Greg Dell stuck a key in the lock and the bolt clicked back.

"The scene of the crime," he said.

The wooden door swung open and there it was, not much different from the way it looked on the day the crime occurred. Sunlight filtered through stained glass, dust motes wafting above the altar and the wooden pews.

It was in this sanctuary of Chicago's Broadway United Methodist Church on a day last September that Dell committed the act. In many ways, it was like every other wedding he'd performed in his 28 years as a minister. One member of the couple sang a solo. The other read from Scripture. Friends and family sang "When Love Is Found." Rings and vows were traded.

And when it was all over, a Chicago systems analyst and a Chicago teacher stood bound in holy union. Their names were Keith and Karl.

Dell has been in the news a bit since then. He's apt to be in it more soon, once he goes to trial in a Methodist court for performing a same-sex union ceremony in violation of a Methodist ruling made in August. His fate could affect the fate of many other Protestant ministers and their gay parishioners.

What made this widely respected pastor, this heterosexual husband and father, risk his job for gay people? What makes anyone take risks for people whose problems are not their own?

I went to see Dell on Friday to ask.

He is a compact man with an easy smile and a calming baritone. His receding gray hair is cropped now, but it's easy to see the shadow of the energetic young minister who 25 years ago, upon taking a job in the tiny conservative Illinois town of Minooka, amiably refused to cut his shoulder-length locks.

Dell grew up in the white, blue-collar suburb of Midlothian. He was a dutiful churchgoer, an Eagle Scout, son of the police chief. It was hardly an activist upbringing. But somehow, in the tumult of the 1960s, Dell became concerned about racism. When Martin Luther King Jr. came to town, Dell joined the march. Later, at Duke divinity school, he had what he calls his "faith conversion experience." It was on the day King was shot to death.

"I realized then there was something more powerful than the power of death," he said, sitting in his office in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, surrounded by shelves of Bibles. "If you played it safe, stayed out of the issues, you could never experience the full life. But if you took on the full life, you'd experience loss and hurt."

Over the years, as a pastor in Evanston and Oak Park, Dell began to connect the dots between different kinds of oppression. Racism wasn't so different from sexism, which wasn't so different from the rejection faced by gays. He marveled at the multitude of ways people found to feel superior to others and how the Bible can be manipulated to defend bigotry.

"I'm a Bible-based Christian," he said, "but I insist on a responsible use of the Bible."

When he came to Broadway United Methodist in 1995, he'd already performed a lot of gay marriages, known in the church as "services of holy union." In his new congregation, which is one-third gay, it was only natural to continue. And so he did, even after the church's August ruling. He wasn't crusading. He was just ministering.

"If you see two people who are really in love, committed to each other, who want to be faithful not only to each other but to a vision of themselves as a couple, and then somebody says it's perverse . . ." He sighed. "It just doesn't make sense."

He doesn't speak bitterly about those who oppose him, but he can't deny the anxiety of waiting for what could be a January trial. If he loses, he could lose his ministry.

"This is what I love to do," he said. Tears flashed in his eyes. "But if it costs you your integrity to survive, it's not worth surviving."

A while later, he excused himself. He had a Christmas-shopping date with his wife of 30 years, Jade, one of their rare social moments together since his troubles began.

I stood for a while after that in the silent sanctuary, thinking how tempting it is for most of us to hug the safe shores of the accepted and the usual even when the accepted is unacceptable and the usual is unjust. Greg Dell, in his quiet way, understands that the acts that change a life or the world usually happen way out on thin ice.