I loved God. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.
For years, the struggle had no name.
The prayers were real. The faith was real. So was the secret you carried into every service, every altar call, every quiet moment with God.
This book was written for that person: you are not alone, and this is not the end of your story.
I knew what the church believed.
I didn’t know where that left me.
The church named the sin. But no one stayed long enough to explain what came next. No roadmap. No testimony. No shepherd for the part of you that kept showing up broken.
Born Gay, Born Again is the conversation most churches never had – not a debate about doctrine, but an honest walk through shame, silence, unanswered prayers, and what healing actually looks like when someone decides to stay.
It is exhausting to carry a secret in every prayer.
You lifted your hands. You sang every word. You went to the altar more than once. And you walked away still carrying the same weight.
Not because you lacked faith. Because no one in the room knew how to hold what you were carrying.
I became two people to survive.
One life for Sunday. One life for everything else. You learned which version of yourself was safe in which room. You learned how to shout while bleeding. How to lead while hiding.
The weight of two lives is not sustainable. But when the alternative felt like losing everything, two lives felt safer than one honest one.
The questions nobody stays long enough to answer.
Why am I like this?
Why hasn’t God changed me?
Can I love Jesus and still struggle?
Will this battle ever end?
Am I broken?
For those living it – and those loving someone through it.
For the believer fighting alone, who has prayed for years and is tired of asking why.
For the parent who found out and doesn’t know what to say next.
For the pastor who preaches on Sunday and has no language for what someone confessed on Monday.
For the spouse standing in the gap with nothing left but love.
For the friend who wants to stay but doesn’t know how.
Before there was a book, there were two men
trying to survive their own story.
Reginald Robinson and Zaire Willis are two husbands, two pastors, two men who lived this from both sides – the Sunday morning stage and the parking lot at midnight. They fell. They repented. They were restored. And then they built Brand New You, a discipleship movement for men who thought freedom wasn’t possible for someone like them.
“I learned how to shout while I was bleeding. I learned how to lift my hands while hiding. I learned how to be ‘anointed’ in public while living with unanswered prayers in private.”
— Reginald Robinson, Born Gay, Born Again
“God wasn’t just delivering me from something. He was calling me into something.”
— Reginald Robinson, Born Gay, Born Again
The chapters I wish someone gave me years ago.
This book doesn’t start at the altar. It starts earlier – in the experiences that shaped desire before you had words for it, in the silence that made the secret feel permanent, in the questions that stayed long after every sermon ended.
This is not a book about becoming someone else. It is about finally bringing your whole self to God.
It is an invitation to stop hiding from the God who already knows. To surrender not behaviour but the whole self. To discover that holiness is not about what you’re coming out of – it’s about what you’re being brought into.
Healing began when I stopped fighting alone.
Zaire and Reginald didn’t just write a book. They built a community for men who want to go further – not alone.
Brand New You exists to help men find community, have courageous conversations, and discover their identity in Christ. Over a hundred men have walked through it. The Genesis Cohort – an eight-week mentorship intensive – has walked men through what this book puts into words.
The book gives you the language. Brand New You gives you the brotherhood.
We became the people we once needed.
Reginald Robinson
Reginald Robinson is the founder of Brand New You and senior pastor of VEIR – The Church at Huntsville.
A native of Mobile, Alabama, he left a successful career in urban planning to pastor full-time. His personal testimony of deliverance fuels a movement that has walked over a hundred men toward freedom in Christ.
He is a husband and father of three.
Zaire Willis
Zaire Willis is the co-founder of Brand New You and executive pastor of VEIR.
Over a decade in ministry – worship, administration, discipleship – and a life marked by one thing: choosing surrender every day.
A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Zaire’s story of restoration through community and discipleship is at the heart of everything Brand New You does. He is a husband.
Hope. Identity. Restoration.
Born Gay, Born Again is one of thousands of titles published by Charisma House. If this story moved you – stories like it, resources for the journey, and books that speak into the places most people don’t – we’ll send them straight to your inbox.
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