J. Robert Busche, Former LWR Official, Dies

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-Misso= uri 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= =20 Lutheran Council in the USA, Busche became its associate general secretary = and=20 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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