OAK PARK, Calif. – Some people have their midlife crisis in reverse, for instance Ronald Boyer. For most of his professional life, he has been better known as a star of pornographic films, Rod Fontana.

After 30 years of sowing the wildest of oats, Boyer, 54, has searched his soul and chosen, to the surprise of family and colleagues, to seek priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

From his work in the rented villas of the San Fernando Valley, where hard-core sex films are shot, Boyer has moved just a short distance west, to the Church of the Epiphany, which is guiding his transformation from porn star to preacher.

The psychic distance, however, has been vast. In January, this lumbering 6-foot-3 performer was greeting fans on the red carpet of the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, along with porn superstars such as Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy.

In June, Boyer was carrying the Holy Bible and a text titled “Gospel Light” to a live Internet show where he preached on the relative evils of pornography.

“Is pornography a sin?” Boyer asked on the show, which is aimed at people in the sex industry. “Probably. Definitely,” he answered, a response that reflected his own ambivalence as much as a desire not to alienate his audience. “So is eating carrot cake until you’re sick to your stomach,” he continued. “And so is punching somebody in the face. That’s a sin.”

Boyer’s embryonic ministry, devoted to bringing spiritual comfort to those marginalized by the sex industry, is driven by his deep faith and by a medical crisis that threatened the life of his child. But it is a work in progress, fraught with the contradictions and internal struggles of a man leaving behind a livelihood that was central to his identity.

He has tired of performing in sex movies, but even now doesn’t condemn it. “Not one time did Jesus refer to pornography or homosexuality,” he observed on this Internet show, which he began as a co-host in May. “Jesus could have commented. He didn’t.”

Still, to pursue a new path as a religious leader, he had to make a clear choice. At the end of January, Boyer, who is married to a recently retired porn star, Liza Harper, announced his own retirement and gave up directing and performing in hard-core movies, he said. “I don’t enjoy it anymore,” he said at the time.

Boyer’s embrace of Christianity was not a result of a bolt-from-the-blue conversion. It was a gradual awakening to spirituality, in part stirred by unsettling changes in the multibillion-dollar pornography industry that has veered into extreme territory in search of new ways of selling sex.

His journey from one private corner of American society to another has, by chance, traced the contours of America’s experiment with sexual liberation to a return to more traditional values.

For Boyer, his path completes a circle. He grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist community in South Carolina, where he was baptized and pursued a penchant for preaching as a teenager.

The contradiction between giving up pornography and feeling its attraction was still apparent in June, four months after retiring. “I love sex,” he said. “I love performing. I love the combination of the two. I could go back and do it again, but I don’t think I would. I had a passion for that. I put it there. Now I’ve channeled my passion to a different place.”

Giving up pornography is only one step on a long, difficult road to becoming a priest. The process will take several years. Boyer began by being confirmed in the Episcopal Church this year. He is undergoing training to become a deacon, which will allow him to conduct most aspects of ministering short of the sacraments. To become a priest, he must study in a seminary for about two years, and his candidacy must be approved by the diocesan bishop.

J. Jon Bruno, bishop for the Los Angeles Diocese, said Boyer’s path to the priesthood would not be precluded by who he was. “I wouldn’t put up an immediate impediment because of someone’s past life,” he said. “There’s no exclusion in the gospel for anybody.”

His embrace of Jesus is hardly the stuff of a tidy Sunday homily. Fellow parishioners at the Church of the Epiphany in Oak Park do not know about Boyer’s life in pornography, and the church leaders who do seem uncomfortable discussing it in depth.

“I am hoping he can bring hopefulness and a love of Christ to people who desperately need it,” said the Rev. Hank Mitchel, vicar of the church, on a recent Sunday after services.

There is one other element of Boyer’s story. He and his wife have a daughter, Diana, who at 11 months old came down with a deadly staph infection from an insect bite on her bicep. Doctors prepared to amputate the baby’s arm when she did not respond to several antibiotics. But at the last moment they found a new drug to which the baby responded.

The experience convinced both Boyer and Harper, who was raised Roman Catholic, that they wanted to be part of a church.

He was rejected by several congregations before coming to Oak Park, he said. When Mitchel heard the story of their daughter, now a delicate 4-year-old, the vicar recalled, “I broke down in tears and said, ‘You are welcome here.’ “