Rev. Dr. Eustace Lloyd Renner
November 7, 1930 – August 29, 2000. Minister, educator and organizer, from Sierra Leone.
Our father believed in giving people a hand up, not a handout. He studied on two continents, served the church across Africa, and kept a plaque on his wall that read, "The poor cannot eat theories."
This page is the beginning of a fuller biography we hope to write. If you knew him, we would be grateful for your memories.
The Renner family
His life at a glance
- 1930Born November 7 in Sierra Leone, into a family of early Christian converts.
- 1948Begins working for the EUB church in Sierra Leone, first as an office assistant, then as Conference Treasurer.
- 1950Licensed to preach by Bishop Warner.
- 1951–1954Studies theology at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, while pastoring three worship centres, two of which he started.
- 1954Appointed the church's Conference Director of Youth Work.
- 1955Leads the church youth camp he called the highlight of his work, then leaves for Albright College in Pennsylvania.
- 1959Completes his BA at Albright and arrives at seminary in Naperville, Illinois, on February 12. In September, speaks at an E.U.B. Youth Rally in Geneva, Indiana.
- 1961Receives his Bachelor of Divinity from Evangelical Theological Seminary, Naperville, Illinois, on May 8, and is ordained a minister of the Evangelical United Brethren Church. Tours the United States on behalf of the EUB Board of Missions. On November 24, marries Zainabu Roberts in Paynesville, Minnesota.
- 1962Receives his Master of Sacred Theology from Yale Divinity School. Leaves for Sierra Leone on March 28.
- 1965Heads the Bible Training and Vocational Institute in Bo, raising a young family.
- 1969–1975Serves the All Africa Conference of Churches as its Christian Education Secretary, a continent-wide post based in Nairobi, Kenya.
- Early 1970sMoves the family to Ibadan, Nigeria.
- 1973–1974The family lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
- 1975 onwardBack in Sierra Leone. Serves as General Secretary of the United Christian Council of Sierra Leone (later the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone), works for the Bible Society of Sierra Leone, and serves for several years as a local pastor at Bishop Baughman Memorial Church, Bright Street, Brookfields.
- 1984Albright College awards him an honorary Doctor of Divinity.
- 1992Attends his 30th Yale reunion, tours the U.S. raising $20,000, and starts a lending fund for women in Sierra Leone.
- 1995Directs the Faith and Fortitude Farm Programme in Freetown, helping hundreds of women and children who fled to Waterloo during the rebel war.
- 1997Survives the coup that overran his home town of Waterloo, losing property including his pineapple farm. Threatened for refusing to support the coup leaders, he leaves for Canada in the fall.
- 1998In Saskatoon, Canada, inspires a partnership between St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and the women of Waterloo, Sierra Leone.
- 2000Dies August 29, at 69.
Roots
Eustace Renner was born into a Christian home. His Yale classmates recorded that his family had been converted to Christianity by a German missionary, and that his grandfather took that missionary's name, Renner.
The first Church Missionary Society missionaries in Africa were two German Lutherans, Melchior Renner and Peter Hartwig, who were sent to Freetown in 1804. Our family name may trace back to that mission.
This is what our family recalls and what his Yale classmates wrote, but we have not yet been able to verify it. If you have records or family knowledge that can confirm or correct it, we would be glad to hear from you.
His father, Rev. Dr. S. M. Renner of Freetown, was a minister of the United Brethren Church and a builder of ministers. Rev. Emmanuel Munda Wilson, who later became a United Methodist elder and seminary teacher, recalled being christened by him at Moyamba and, years later, being "raised and coached for Christian ministry" by him.
Dr. Renner enlisted fellow clergy to help prepare the young man, among them Rev. B. A. Carew and both of his own sons, J. K. C. and Eustace. (Rev. Wilson's 2016 recollection; archived copy.)
His mother, as his classmates told it, could not rest while a neighbor went hungry. On her own initiative she started programs to feed the poor of Freetown. His elder brother, Rev. J. K. C. Renner, known as Chrispin, also became a minister and was serving as chaplain of Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1961.
In his own words, he was "the fourth of four boys and two sisters both adopted after my mother lost five girls." He went to school in Moyamba and Freetown.
A scholar on two continents
His working life in the church began at 17. In 1948 he joined the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) mission in Sierra Leone as an office assistant and soon became Conference Treasurer.
In 1950, after what he called years of "kicking against the goad," he was licensed to preach by Bishop Warner. From 1951 to 1954 he studied theology at Fourah Bay College, West Africa's oldest university, earning a licentiate while pastoring three worship centres, two of which he had started himself.
In 1954 he became the church's Conference Director of Youth Work. The youth camp of 1955, he wrote, was the highlight of that work and convinced him that God had called him to young people's ministry, though he "was not prepared for it." The church's Department of World Missions offered him further training in America.
At Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, an EUB college, he won the award for best freshman, served as president of both the pre-ministerial fraternity Kappa Tau Chi and the YMCA, and stage-managed his denomination's Quadrennial Pageant. He completed his BA in 1959. Decades later he wrote, "The best years of my life have been those spent at Albright College."
He arrived at seminary in Naperville at 4 p.m. on a foggy February 12, 1959, to the question he heard again and again: "So you are from Sierra Leone?"
He made it the title of an article for the Seminary Review, signing it Eustace "Gus" Renner, and closed with a promise: "I beg for your continued prayers and support as I go back to the 'Macedonian calling' Africa." Read his full article.
Evangelical Theological Seminary was the EUB church's own seminary. He received his Bachelor of Divinity at its 83rd commencement on May 8, 1961, the only graduate in his class from Africa. He was ordained an EUB minister.
His Yale classmates later remembered his seminary as Garrett, and both are right in their way: after the EUB and Methodist churches united in 1968, the two seminaries merged in 1974 to form Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
He also completed courses at Harvard Divinity School, and in 1962 received his Master of Sacred Theology from Yale Divinity School. He later earned a Diploma in Community Development from the University of Manchester in England, and Albright College awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity, which we believe was in 1984.
1961: America, and a wedding
He was already in demand as a speaker. In September 1959 the Decatur Daily Democrat in Indiana announced that the E.U.B. Youth Rally at Geneva would have as its speaker "Eustace Renner, a talented young Negro student from Sierra Leone, Africa," in the language of the time.
In 1961 he was touring the United States on behalf of the EUB Board of Missions, staying with church families along the way. On November 24 he married Zainabu Roberts, a fellow Sierra Leonean and Westmar College graduate, at the First EUB Church in Paynesville, Minnesota. His brother Chrispin co-officiated, and Sierra Leone's ambassador to the United States, Dr. Richard E. Kelfa-Caulker, gave the bride away.
Rev. Willert Zahl, who officiated, remembered that the couple "always called us Ma and Pa." He wrote that both "would be returning to Africa to work in our mission."
Newspapers reported that the couple would return home to engage in the religious education of their countrymen and to work with young people and women in Africa. The West Central Daily Tribune in Minnesota reported that he would serve as director of religious education and help with youth work. They left for Sierra Leone on March 28, 1962.
Read Zainabu Renner's story, including the newspaper reports and snapshots of the wedding.
His American years were also the years of the civil rights movement. In January 1962, The Vanguard, the newsletter of the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America, published a column by a pastor in Valparaiso, Indiana, describing how he and his wife opened their home to people of every race in a town known for keeping Black residents out.
Among the names in their guest register: "Howard Vassallo and Eustace Renner from Sierra Leone, W. Africa," alongside a future Nigerian minister of state and Ambrose Reeves, the former Anglican bishop of Johannesburg.
Ministry across Africa
Back in Sierra Leone, he joined the church's work in education. By 1965 he headed the Bible Training and Vocational Institute in Bo, a school that paired faith with practical skills. The missionary surgeon Dr. Lowell Gess counted "Crispin and Eustace Renner" among the "great preachers" of the Sierra Leone Conference he loved to hear. In September 1965, when Gess lay gravely ill with hepatitis at Taiama, Eustace and Zainabu stopped on their way through town, and Eustace prayed for him "actually kneeling by the bedside." Gess remembered it as one of the few bright moments of "the lowest ebb of my life." From January 1969 to January 1975 he served the All Africa Conference of Churches, the fellowship of Africa’s Protestant and Orthodox churches, as its Christian Education Secretary, a post based at its Nairobi headquarters that took him across the continent. The family lived in Ibadan, Nigeria, and in Nairobi, Kenya, during those years, before returning home in 1975. By his own account, he served the church for more than 30 years in Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia and southern Africa.
He served as General Secretary of the United Christian Council of Sierra Leone (later the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone), the body that brought the country's churches together, and he worked for the Bible Society of Sierra Leone to put Scripture into people's hands.
Under his leadership, member churches across the country began development programs of their own. He also opened doors: around 1990 he arranged for Dr. Gess and his wife, Ruth, to meet President Joseph Saidu Momoh, who thanked them for the work of the Kissy UMC Eye Hospital. For several years in the early 1980s he also served as a local pastor at Bishop Baughman Memorial Church on Bright Street, Brookfields, in Freetown, where the family worshipped for several years. Stacey and Sylvester both sang in its choir.
"The poor cannot eat theories." The plaque on Eustace Renner's wall
His father raised him to offer people a way to help themselves, and he lived by that conviction.
In 1992 he attended his 30th class reunion at Yale Divinity School. Over lunch he persuaded classmates to host him on a tour across the United States, visiting their churches to raise money for a lending fund for women in Sierra Leone, an idea inspired by the microcredit movement then gaining attention worldwide.
He reached his goal of $20,000, returned home, and set up a group of local women to run the fund. It lent women the means to start businesses: seed for a vegetable garden, or a sewing machine to make and sell tie-dyed clothing.
The hard years
The civil war reached his doorstep in the 1990s. In April 1995, writing on the letterhead of the Faith and Fortitude Farm Programme, which he directed, he apologized to American friends for a late reply: he had been "busy helping and finding assistance (especially in food, clothing, blankets and cooking utensils) for the hundreds of women, young people and children who have fled to the Waterloo Village Community" from the rebel incursion.
That same spring he had to give up a trip to his Albright class reunion because he could not raise the airfare.
Waterloo, about 20 miles from Freetown, had long been part of our family's life. Our grandfather, Rev. Dr. S. M. Renner, kept a house there and spent many Saturdays in the town, and his grandchildren visited often. In his later years our father lived there on and off and developed a pineapple farm.
On May 25, 1997, a military coup overran his home town of Waterloo. From June to September the family faced threats, hunger and the confiscation of property, including the pineapple farm he loved.
He would not endorse the coup leaders. "I was open with them that what they are doing is not right," he said. They seized the truck he used on the farm, and for weeks the threatening calls came at two in the morning. His answer: "If you kill me, you will be doing me a favour because I know I am going to be with my Saviour." Friends who feared for his life helped him leave the country at 65.
In the fall of 1997 the Mayor of Waterloo, Ontario, sent him a ticket to the yearly gathering of the world’s Waterloos. With Freetown’s airport closed, he spent two weeks travelling by bus and plane through Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to reach Canada. He then joined his brother Andrew and sister-in-law in Saskatoon, where he fell seriously ill and was cared for by the congregation of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.
Even far from home, his concern was for Waterloo. He told his new friends about "crumbs from the table," the food program he had started by asking neighbours for "10 cups of rice, that extra tin of soup and a few dollars," which grew to feed 100 senior citizens every month. He told them about the 72 women of Waterloo’s Women’s Agricultural Organization, whose tie-dye, cooking and garden businesses the coup had wiped out. St. Andrew’s raised about $4,000, matched by Presbyterian World Service and Development, to help the women start again.
"They often give us a hand-out rather than a hand up," he said of aid agencies. "They always say they have a mandate. I tell them ‘mandates’ are ‘man-made’ and can be ‘man-changed.’"
He died on August 29, 2000, at 69.
His legacy
His Yale classmates closed their remembrance by noting that his son carries his legacy forward through a nonprofit in the United States. That nonprofit is Develop Africa, which helps children in Sierra Leone get an education.
His encouragement shaped others, too. Two months after his death, his Saskatoon friend Mary Jane Hanson wrote that he had inspired her to begin writing devotionals, a ministry she has continued for more than two decades. Read her tribute, "Encouragement" (PresbyCan Daily Devotional, November 3, 2000).
The line runs through three generations: a grandmother who fed the hungry of Freetown, a father who lent women the means to earn a living, and a son working to put children in school.
In the records
Photographs
If you can help date any of these photographs, please let us know.
Help us tell his story
Our family is gathering material for a biography of our father. If you knew him as a pastor, a colleague at the Bible Society or the United Christian Council, a classmate at Albright, seminary or Yale, a neighbor in Waterloo, or a member of the family, please share your memories, letters or photographs at memories@sylrenner.com.
Sources: family records; Lowell A. Gess, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Medical Missionary’s African Challenges (RLE Press, 2002), pp. 108, 128, 232; All Africa Conference of Churches archives, Nairobi (correspondence, 2026); Mary Jane Hanson, "A Few Crumbs From the Table," The Presbyterian Record, December 1998, pp. 31–33; Mary Jane Hanson, "Encouragement", PresbyCan Daily Devotional, November 3, 2000; Seminary Review (May 1959 and May 1961), Evangelical Theological Seminary, via Styberg Library, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary; Yale Divinity School Class of 1962, remembrance of Eustace Renner; Manly Signal (November 30, 1961), West Central Daily Tribune (November 27, 1961), and Le Mars Daily Sentinel (December 8 and December 18, 1961); Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary history; The Vanguard (January 1962), Lutheran Human Relations Association of America, via ValpoScholar; Decatur Daily Democrat (September 19, 1959), via Hoosier State Chronicles; Evangelical Theological Seminary commencement program (May 8, 1961), North Central College Archives; Rev. Emmanuel Munda Wilson (2016); Eustace Renner, letter of April 1995; Willert W. Zahl, His World Was Ours To Share (Hutchinson, Minn.: Crow River Press, 1989).