Our Pastors
Rev. John L. Bush - Senior Pastor
The Reverend John L. Bush, a lifelong Missouri Synod Lutheran, was born in 1949 in Oak Park, Illinois, to Lewis and Eleanor Bush.
Upon completing college in 1971, he began a career in marketing and sales promotion. Prior to beginning his own agency in 1985, he helped launch the Special Offers Department of Montgomery Ward.
He entered Concordia Seminary at St. Louis in September 1995, and upon completion of the Alternate Route Program, graduated in May of 1999. He was assigned to St. Paul to serve his vicarage, and was installed as Senior Pastor to St. Paul Lutheran Church July 28, 2002.
John and His wife, Laurel, live in Brownstown. They are also the parents of grown children, Sean, Christopher, and Jamie.
Rev. Dr. Richard Blythe - Associate Pastor - Spiritual Growth
The Rev. Dr. Richard (Rick) Blythe is most recently from the St. Louis area, where he
served as an associate pastor at a church plant. He heralds from Lexington, Kentucky, where his father still lives.
After he received his B.S. in mathematics and English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1980s, he started out in information technology in Silicon Valley. But in the early 1990s, as the Iron Curtain began to fall across Central Europe, he and his wife, Amy, went to the mission field as Lutheran High School teachers in Slovakia. After the couple served as lay volunteer missionaries, Rick went to the seminary in the late 1990s to become a fulltime missionary.
In 1999, Rick and family went to Europe to be missionaries for six years. During their service overseas, St. Paul was one of the supporting congregations of the Blythe family. He returned in 2005 to enter a PhD program. Graduating with his Doctorate in Historical Theology from Concordia Seminary in 2009, he served as a relief worker and then as an administrative pastor in Pacific, Missouri. He was installed as Associate Pastor for Spiritual Growth at St. Paul Lutheran Church in June of 2012.
Rick, Amy, and their two teenage boys, Jake and Ben, live in Trenton.
Rev. Nick W. Koschmann - Associate Pastor of Youth & Young Adults
Pastor Koschmann was born in 1980 in Juneau, Alaska and has lived all over the United States. He is most recently from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He attended college at Concordia University River Forest with plans to become a High School Band Director. During his sophomore year at CURF he changed majors and joined the Pre-Seminary program. After graduating from CURF in 2003, he enrolled in Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He served his vicarage at Bethany Lutheran Church in Kaukauna, Wisconsin and, upon graduation from the seminary in 2007, received his first Call to serve here at St. Paul.
Nick and his wife, Rachael, live in Trenton along with their daughter, Lucy, their son, Murray, and the newest addition to their family, Ginny.
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