An Ohio Pastor Was Convicted for Sheltering the Homeless Overnight. An Appeals Court Just Threw It Out.

Pastor Chris Avell kept the doors of Dad's Place open all night in Bryan, Ohio, so that people with nowhere else to go could sleep somewhere warm. The city of Bryan decided that was a fire code problem.

I have read the charging documents twice now, and the plainest way to say it is this: a small town prosecuted a pastor, criminally, for running an overnight shelter out of his own church. Eighteen zoning charges. Unannounced fire inspections. A conviction that carried a two hundred dollar fine and a sixty day suspended jail sentence, for a building that, by the city's own logic, needed sprinkler systems the town does not require of its motels or its apartment buildings or its senior living facilities.

Matthew's gospel has a line about this that gets quoted so often at church potlucks it has gone a little soft in the mouth: I was a stranger and you took me in. Nobody in Bryan City Hall was thinking about that verse when they filed the paperwork. They were thinking about code compliance. That is not a crime. It might even be their job. But somewhere between the ordinance and the pastor, something got lost, and it took two years and an appeals court to find it again.

On Friday, Ohio's Sixth District Court of Appeals vacated Avell's criminal conviction. The reasoning was almost embarrassingly simple: the trial court had never actually ruled on his constitutional defenses. Not rejected them. Never addressed them. A man was convicted of a crime while the judge left his First Amendment and Ohio Conscience Clause arguments sitting unopened on the bench, and it took an appellate panel to notice nobody had opened the mail.

This was not the city's first loss. Back in April, the Williams County Court of Common Pleas had already thrown out a separate civil case the city brought trying to shut the ministry down entirely, dismissing it with prejudice, a lawyer's way of saying the city does not get to try that particular argument again. Two courts, two proceedings, the same church, the same winter shelter, and now the same conclusion twice: the city kept skipping past the pastor's constitutional defenses on its way to a verdict.

The case goes back to the trial court now, which has to weigh Avell's free exercise claims under strict scrutiny, the standard that asks the government to prove it has a compelling reason and no less restrictive way of achieving it. That is a real legal hurdle, and it may take months to clear. Dad's Place has waited two years already.

I keep thinking about the sprinkler heads. The city never explained why a motel down the street could shelter the same number of strangers overnight without the equipment it demanded from a church doing the same thing for free. Maybe there is an answer. Maybe fire code is fire code regardless of a cross on the building. But two years, eighteen charges, and a criminal conviction is a strange amount of civic energy to spend finding out, and it is hard not to notice that the building doing free what the motel does for money is the one that ended up in court.

Dad's Place is still open. People are still sleeping there tonight, warm, because a pastor decided a fire code violation was a smaller sin than turning someone away in January. The trial court will take up his constitutional defenses again, this time with the appellate court watching. Whatever it decides, the harder question was never really legal. It was the one Bryan, Ohio answered first, before any of the paperwork, when it looked at an open door in the cold and called it a problem.

Sources:

• The Village Reporter, "Appeals Court Vacates Fire Code Conviction Against Dad's Place Pastor Chris Avell," September 25, 2026: thevillagereporter.com
• The Toledo Blade, "Appellate court vacates pastor's criminal conviction in Dad's Place case," September 25, 2026: toledoblade.com