The truce signed between the north and south in Korea in 1953 may have put
an end to the fighting but not to the suffering of separated families. Hospitals
were crowded and not equipped to handle the masses of people needing care.
Into this scene Bette Shipps arrived in South Korea in 1957 as an OMS mis-
sionary assigned to serve as a nurse at Severance Hospital.
Newly graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary in 1958, J.B. Crouse
Jr. was commissioned as an OMS missionary and immediately went to Korea
to assist in the work of the World Relief Commission. As deputy director of
the WRC, J.B. oversaw the feeding stations in the Korea Evangelical Holiness
Churches (KEHC) to help alleviate the starving victims of the Korean War.
J.B. and Bette met while at Asbury College, but their romance and mar-
riage didn’t take place until they had individually committed their lives to mis-
sionary service and both “just happened” to end up in Seoul, Korea. They
married in 1961 in New Jersey. On their return to Seoul, they were greeted by
OMS workers with a decorated jeep and a horn-blowing processional on the
hour-long ride to the OMS compound! In the following years, J.B. and Bette
raised three sons, Jay, Jon, and Steve, all graduates of Seoul Foreign School.
As an ordained pastor, J.B.’s heart for evangelism blossomed as he di-
rected Total Impact Evangelism, taking the Gospel into schools, army camps,
and churches and starting an apartment evangelism ministry, giving seminary
students training and opportunities for outreach. J.B.’s leadership skills were
honed as he served as acting field leader for a number of years while Dr. Elmer
Kilbourne spent six months of each year in the States, raising funds for Seoul
Theological Seminary. Thus, he was well prepared to take on field leadership
in 1985.
Building relationships with the KEHC leaders was paramount for J.B. Tak-
ing pastors on tours throughout Southeast Asia, and later to South America,
he exposed them to the need for growing their missions outreach beyond the
borders of South Korea. Other pastors went to the States with J.B. to visit
major churches. Most of those pastors were inspired to increase their support
of missions–some up to half of their annual budget!
When the KEHC started the Evangelical Missionary Training Center (EMTC),
J.B. and Bette led special sessions with the candidates, sharing firsthand ex-
periences of cultural adaptation. Today, the KEHC has 566 missionaries around
the world, with 12 currently being trained in the EMTC.
An early morning phone call in July 1991 alerted the Korea field mission-
aries to the appointment of J.B. as the eighth President of OMS. God would
enlarge J. B.’s and Bette’s hearts for a world in desperate need of the Gospel.
As hard as it was for them to leave Korea after 34 years, God surely brought
the Crouses to the OMS World Headquarters for “such a time as this.” J.B. as-
sumed the presidency at a critical time for OMS. Plans to get OMS on a sound
financial base required making hard changes. With great perseverance and
determination from J.B. and Bette’s graceful touch of hand and heart, they
accomplished the enormous task God had entrusted them with, leading OMS
into the 21 st century.
Editor’s note: J.B. went to be with Jesus in June 2014. Bette lives in Kentucky.
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