Daniel Renner

Pastor at Grace Reformed Church. He has been there longer than most of the current congregation has been members, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. Mid-fifties, gray at the temples, walks the aisle on the way to the pulpit with the gait of someone who used to play sports and still thinks of himself as someone who plays sports. Glasses he forgets are pushed up onto his head until he reaches for them in the pulpit and finds them there, every other week.

His sermons are slow. He spends a lot of time on Greek words, which I will admit was a surprise the first time, since I did not expect a Reformed pastor in a county-road church to be the sort of person who works publicly from the original languages. He is. He carries a small leather notebook with his own handwritten interlinear notes in it. After three years I have learned to bring my own notebook.

He is not a remarkable orator and seems uninterested in becoming one. He does not work the room. What he does is read carefully and tell you what he found. He treats the congregation as if we have come to be informed rather than moved, and the effect, paradoxically, is more moving than the alternative would have been. The Easter sermon (What Peter Saw) was a good example of how he works. He took one verse, pulled a single Greek word out of it, sat with the word for ten minutes, and then sat back down. I remember it.

I have spoken with him only a handful of times in the lobby. He remembers names. That alone is unusual.