Mary Bush addresses the 350 who attended the March 6 memorial service held for her husband and their pastor Ted Bush. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Tim Pallesen
DELRAY BEACH — First Presbyterian is Delray Beach’s church near the sea.
But the Rev. Ted Bush, the pastor for 27 years, encouraged his congregation to look west to find their mission.
The Rev. Bush, who retired two years ago, died on Feb. 26 after a massive stroke. He was 66.
“His vehicle for saving souls was to get out into the community to do something good,” recalled Noel Smith, the pastor’s close friend in the congregation.
The poorest children in west Delray Beach got a sports program that grew to become Teddy’s Field at Pompey Park. The homeless are fed at Caring Kitchen.
And Rev. Bush was a driving force to establish the Caridad Clinic to provide medical and dental care to migrant farmworkers west of Boynton Beach.
More than 350 attended a March 6 memorial service to celebrate First Presbyterian’s long-time spiritual leader.
“He could always see. The veil for Ted was so thin between Earth and the other world,” said the the Rev. Linda Harper, who officiated at the service.
“Ted brought this intuitive sight to every pastoral encounter,” Harper said. “He became a vessel through which the spirit of God would be present — and he knew how to get out of the way for that to happen.”
Smith recalled that a church study committee once suggested First Presbyterian do its outreach work on the beach. Bush instead asked the police chief for a tour of Delray Beach’s poorest neighborhood to see what needed to be done.
Social worker Caridad Asensio came to Bush asking that he observe the squalor that migrant farmworkers were enduring.
Smith recalled that skeptics questioned whether they really needed medical and dental care. But 400 people came the first day in 1992 when the Caridad Clinic opened with volunteer doctors and dentists.
The Caring Kitchen, Teddy’s Field and the Achievement Centers for Children and Families are other examples of First Presbyterian’s generosity under Bush’s leadership.
“You have helped to significantly change and heal some small pieces of a very fractured world,” Rev. Bush told his congregation four years ago on the 25th anniversary of his Delray Beach ministry.
“You have the unique ability to look beyond yourselves, to look to the people outside the walls of this church,” he said. “Often these people are on the very edge of society. You have changed the lives of countless people.”
The running joke in the congregation was that Rev. Bush never had time to clean his garage.
Everyone laughed at the memorial service when his wife, Mary, reported that he finally cleaned the garage after he retired.
Model trains and baseball were two of Ted Bush’s favorite pastimes away from church.
Mourners at the private burial service were drawn to a passing train whistle as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
“Maybe it was just a coincidence. But we all knew how much Ted loved messing about his garage with his trains, so it felt like more than just a whistle,” Harper said.
“The train was leaving the station,” Smith reflected.
Ted Bush was buried next to his son Teddy, who shared his father’s love for the Chicago Cubs before he died of a brain tumor at age 23.
After the burial service, family members drove to Pompey Park to run the bases at Teddy’s Field.
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