wfn.org | J. Robert Busche, Former LWR Official, Dies

[News News <NEWS@ELCA.ORG>]

ELCA NEWS SERVICE

September 3, 1999

J. ROBERT BUSCHE, FORMER LWR OFFICIAL, DIES
99-221 JB/REAL**

     CHICAGO (ELCA) -- A former top official of Lutheran World Relief
(LWR) and retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
(ELCA), the Rev. John Robert Busche, 75 died Sept. 1 at his home in
Freeport, N.Y., of cancer.
     At one time, Busche was LWR's senior advisor for program and
policy, a position he held for six years.  LWR is an international
relief agency -- a joint ministry of the ELCA and The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
     Funeral services are scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 4 at 1:30 p.m.
at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, Baldwin, N.Y.  Burial will be in
Wooster, Ohio, preceded by a memorial service there on Tuesday, Sept. 7,
at Salem Lutheran Church.
     For more than three decades representing Lutheran churches in the
United States, Busche traveled widely around the globe in support of
self-help projects in developing nations, and facilitating delivery and
distribution of food and other relief to victims of drought, flood and
earthquake disasters.
     Busche was administrator of a Ford Foundation grant to Nommensen
University in Indonesia from 1958 to 1965, while he was assistant
executive director of the National Lutheran Council (NLC).  In 1956 he
moved from a two-and-a-half-year pastorate in Berea, Ohio, to New York
to serve the NLC, which was the U. S. arm of the Lutheran World
Federation (LWF).  When the NLC was merged in 1967 into the broader-based 
Lutheran Council in the USA, Busche became its associate general secretary and 
continued in that position until 1969.
     For almost four years he was on the staff of the former American
Lutheran Church (ALC) at its national headquarters in Minneapolis.
There he was special assistant to the church body's board of trustees
for two years and later assisted ALC President Kent Knutson as
coordinator of national boards and commissions.
     In 1973, he returned to New York to become assistant executive
     director of
LWR until 1983, when he became the agency's senior advisor for program
and policy.  Busche retired at the end of 1989.
     He traveled frequently for LWR to assist indigenous ecumenical
partner agencies within developing nations in Latin America, Asia and
Africa.  In the early 1990s he was a part-time consultant for
Interchurch Medical Assistance of New Windsor, Md.
     His other inter-Lutheran responsibilities while based in New York
included being treasurer of Lutheran Film Associates, National Lutheran
Campus Ministry and the USA Committee for LWF, and assistant treasurer
of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and LWR.
     Busche was born in Westerville, Ohio, on June 10, 1924.  He
graduated from Wooster (Ohio) High School in 1942.  His study at Capital
University in Columbus, Ohio, was interrupted after one year by his
service in the U. S. Navy during World War II as a communication officer
with Joint Task Force One.  After the war, he returned to Capital
majoring in biology and  graduated in 1948.  Following graduation he
worked one year for M&R Dietetics Laboratories in Columbus, contacting
doctors and hospitals.  He planned to study medicine, but he became a
Lutheran minister instead.
     Busche received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1953 from the
Evangelical
Lutheran Theological Seminary in Columbus and, after being ordained,
served almost three years as pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church,
Berea, Ohio.
     He was honored by Capital University with a doctor of divinity
degree in 1962.
     In 1945 Busche married Miriam June Langell, a registered nurse.
     She died
in 1989.  Their three children survive them: Sandra Hoffmann of
Lancester, N.H., Paul Busche of Mound, Minn., and Jennie Sloane of Moses
Lake, Wash.  Busche is also survived by five grandchildren. In February
1999 Busche married Christine Messner, who survives together with his
four step-children and six step-grandchildren.
end

[**Robert E. A. Lee is former executive director, Office of
Communication and Interpretation, Lutheran Council in the U.S.A.]

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