MILWAUKEE (WI)
Journal Sentinel [Milwaukee WI]
May 29, 2025
By Laura Schulte
- Alan Buresh, a former ELCA pastor, exhibited a pattern of abusive behavior towards multiple women, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation shows.
- One woman said she reported his actions to church leaders, but he was allowed to continue ministering for years.
- The ELCA disputes the claims and says it responded promptly to the first complaint received in 2017.
- Experts say churches are often slow to address adult abuse by clergy.
One afternoon in February 2022, Evelyn went to her back door to let her dog out.
There was still snow on the ground in Davenport, Iowa, as she made her way through her home. Her child was away for the day. The house was quiet.
But when she opened the door, Alan Buresh, a man she had been dating for several years, was waiting outside. Brandishing a gun, he forced her back inside the home.
Buresh had cut off his ankle monitor, placed there by the Wisconsin court system after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman he was counseling as a pastor, according to court records. He had resigned from his position, which Evelyn said had left him unmoored and increasingly erratic.
Inside the house, she tried to calm him down, to get him to drop his gun. But she said Buresh told her he was going to kill himself, and Evelyn was going to watch.
Then he fired a single shot into the ceiling.
Buresh, 62, was once beloved by congregations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. As a pastor for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he had reveled in his role teaching the gospel.
But he also used the position to pressure women into sexual relationships under the guise of counseling, according to interviews with five women, who said he would threaten them — sometimes with physical violence or guns — if they attempted to end things.
All of the women asked not to be identified due to their fear of retaliation and concerns for the privacy of their children. They are identified in this story by pseudonyms.
One woman said she reported Buresh’s abuse to regional church leaders in three states, but those leaders did not remove him from the ministry or report her allegations to national leaders. Buresh instead moved from church to church for another 24 years, until other women came forward.
Even then, the ELCA’s response was lackluster, the women said. They hoped for a detailed investigation and formal discipline for Buresh; instead, the organization allowed Buresh to resign.
The ELCA, which is headquartered in Chicago, boasts around 2.8 million members. It is one of the largest denominations to ordain women as pastors, and often takes liberal stances on issues such as immigration, same-sex marriage and gender-based violence.
The organization declined multiple requests for interviews on the subject over many months, opting to respond to questions by email. In an email in May, spokesperson Candice Buchbinder disputed assertions that church leaders were aware of Buresh’s abuse.
“We have not seen any evidence to corroborate these claims,” Buchbinder said.
According to Buchbinder, the church received its first complaint about Buresh in 2017 and responded promptly. After Buresh resigned, he was no longer under the church’s jurisdiction, she said.
Buresh, now in prison in Iowa, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The five women who say they endured Buresh’s abuse over multiple decades, marriages and other relationships said their experience highlights the pervasiveness of clergy abuse and raises questions about how one of the most progressive churches in the nation has been slow to address the issue.
Amelia, one of the women who says she was abused by Buresh, said she felt the ELCA didn’t take her seriously because of the stigma of clergy abuse.
“This is a silent epidemic in Evangelical churches,” she said.
‘Nobody would listen’
After graduating from seminary and interning in several parishes, Buresh received his first appointment as pastor at a small church in Nebraska in 1992.
By all accounts, Buresh was a good minister. Although not tall, his charisma gave him a larger-than-life persona. He led services with care and compassion, and was deeply moved by scripture.
But his wife, Charlotte, said she saw a different side of him — controlling, unstable and violent. In 1993, shortly after moving to Nebraska, Charlotte said she went to church leaders for help the first time.
The ELCA is split into 65 regions known as synods, each led by a bishop. Charlotte recalled piling her children into a van and driving to the Nebraska Synod headquarters under the cover of night, waiting in the office until leaders arrived. Then, she said, she told them about Buresh’s physical and emotional abuse.
Charlotte expected synod leaders to hold Buresh accountable, or at least help keep her and her children safe. But according to a deposition she gave years later in another woman’s lawsuit against the church, synod leaders instead told her to attend marriage counseling with Buresh.
The synod, when reached via email in May, said it did not have “any record” of Charlotte contacting church leaders to report Buresh’s behavior. It did not respond to follow-up questions about whether it was the synod’s practice to make and keep such records at that time.
The abuse continued, Charlotte said.
In 1996, Buresh took a job as a pastor in Storden, Minnesota, a tiny, rural community in the southwest corner of the state. That year, Charlotte said she awoke one night to Buresh holding a gun to her head.
Again, Charlotte said, she went to church leaders, this time with the Southwestern Minnesota synod. Again, according to Charlotte, the bishop and employees did not discipline Buresh, only suggested counseling for the couple.
Eight years later, Charlotte and the family moved to New Richmond, a small town in Wisconsin about 45 minutes outside Minneapolis.
By that time, Charlotte said her husband was threatening her routinely. In interviews and her deposition, she described him taping her phone calls and harassing her friends and coworkers.
Charlotte was too afraid to go to police. She said Buresh warned her that he would be arrested and she would be unable to take care of the children alone.
“I always just reached out to the synod,” she said.
However, the synod did little more than suggest Buresh move out of the house for a few weeks to see if that would calm tensions, according to Charlotte.
The ELCA disputes that Charlotte reported her husband’s abuse to the synods — claims she made under oath in a deposition.
Buchbinder, the spokesperson, said the organization has not seen evidence to corroborate Charlotte’s story “despite the depositions of many current and former bishops and synod staff members in multiple synods and the production of thousands of pages of documents.”
But Charlotte has insisted, both in interviews and in her hours-long deposition, that she notified church leaders at all three synods about the ongoing abuse.
One night in 2005, Charlotte said she decided to try the church one more time.
“I just remember sliding down onto the floor in the kitchen, and just feeling like my life had ended,” she said. “Like I lost everything. So it was at that point that I called the synod again.”
The synod sent two people to her home, including the assistant to the bishop at the time, Charlotte said in her deposition. Charlotte recalled the assistant — a woman — taking her hand and telling her that she had been let down.
Charlotte believed this time the church would do something.
But she never heard from the synod again.
“It was such a stark turnaround for me, to just go forward after that,” Charlotte said. “To just act like nothing happened. I was dumbfounded.”
‘Nobody who would listen’
At the time Charlotte said she first reported her husband to the church, the ELCA had a guidebook for how synods should handle reports of sexual abuse by clergy.
Published in 1992 and updated in 2005, it lays out a step-by-step system.
First, each synod should designate a qualified person to handle claims of abuse, the guidebook states. That person, and the bishop, decide how to investigate each claim.
If the claim is corroborated, the bishop can discipline the pastor through a written charge, a formal disciplinary hearing or a temporary suspension.
If charges are issued, the church recommends convening an advisory panel to hear the claims. If the accusations against the pastor are substantiated, the synod should disclose the findings to the congregation, according to the guidelines.
And throughout, the alleged victim should be given continuous care.
The guidelines are recommendations, not rules. Each synod can handle abuse claims differently, according to Buchbinder.
As far as Charlotte knows, none of the bishops she spoke to pursued an investigation into her husband, put together an advisory panel or formal hearing, disciplined him, or followed up with her.
It is unknown if any of the three synods reported Charlotte’s claims to the national organization. ELCA guidelines do not require individual synods to do so.
At one point, Charlotte reached out to one of the synods about her husband using guns to threaten her, she recalled in interviews. The synod sent a congregant to collect the guns, only for them to be returned shortly after.
Buchbinder, the ELCA spokesperson, acknowledged the incident but said Charlotte asked staff to remove the guns to protect Buresh from hurting himself, “not because she feared he would harm her or others.”
According to Buchbinder, Buresh voluntarily gave over the guns to the synod. The church returned them “after the crisis had passed” because it had no legal authority to keep them, she said in an email.
Charlotte disputes the ELCA’s version of events and said she made it clear that she feared for her life.
In total, over the course of her marriage, Charlotte estimates she went to church leaders nearly a dozen times about the abuse at Buresh’s hands, as well as her suspicions that he was having sexual relationships with the women he was counseling.
“There was really nobody who would listen,” Charlotte said.
In 2005, after more than 20 years of marriage, she called New Richmond police and told them about the abuse. Buresh was charged with misdemeanor battery and ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of disorderly conduct and fined $250.
They divorced in 2006, but Buresh kept ministering in New Richmond.
Soon, he met another woman.
‘I came to understand I was victimized’
In 2010, Buresh began corresponding with a former high school classmate, Amelia, over social media.
At the time, a family member of Amelia’s was going through the end stages of breast cancer. Amelia talked to Buresh about it often, and she leaned on him after the family member passed away.
Amelia wasn’t Lutheran, but identified as Christian. She liked that Buresh counseled her using quotes from the Bible. He shared his weekly sermons with her, and asked for feedback.
“He used that to legitimize the relationship,” she said. “He used spiritual language to make it OK.”
Soon, Buresh was traveling hours from Wisconsin to meet with Amelia in Arkansas. Amelia said he showered her with attention and flattery. He wrote her poems and sent her love songs, often while he was working at church, she said.
But Amelia, who was married, grew uneasy about the relationship. She started distancing herself from Buresh, which made him angry, she said.
Amelia said he started to leave hints about her in his sermons on YouTube, in what she perceived as an effort to keep her quiet. It could be small things they’d talked about privately, or stories that resonated with her.
Eventually, Amelia confessed the relationship to her husband and started attending therapy to cope with the intense anxiety it had caused.
In 2015, she reached out to the ELCA anonymously, but was too afraid to name Buresh. The church connected Amelia with two organizations for survivors of clergy abuse.
“I came to understand I was victimized,” Amelia said.
In 2017, Amelia decided to turn over all the evidence she could gather about her relationship with Buresh to the ELCA.
Amelia and her husband met with ELCA leaders, including Barbara Keller, the top consultant in charge of handling abuse claims for the national organization, in Dallas later that year. Bishop Richard Hoyme, of the Northwest Synod of Wisconsin, was also present for the meeting.
According to Amelia and her husband, ELCA officials said they would investigate Buresh but had no prior complaints about the pastor. The officials did not mention that one congregation had previously taken away Buresh’s guns.
Church officials then met with Buresh. In an email summarizing the meeting, the church told Amelia that Buresh denied any sexual misconduct.
“He basically said, ‘I don’t know where she gets this stuff,’” Amelia said.
The church gave Buresh the opportunity to resign instead of continuing with a formal investigation. He agreed in July 2017.
However, Amelia noticed that Buresh continued to minister on YouTube for Amo Lutheran, an ELCA congregation in Minnesota, where he had previously served as a pastor while married to Charlotte.
Amelia said she pointed out the continuing sermons to the ELCA and local church leaders, but the congregation didn’t put an end to them.
By 2018, a year after his resignation, Buresh was still preaching weekly online.
Buchbinder said the national organization had no authority to stop Buresh from ministering for the Amo congregation.
“Congregations in the ELCA are self-governing,” she said.
‘He taunted me’
At the time that Buresh was pursuing a relationship with Amelia, he was already in a relationship with a woman from his church.
Olivia first met Buresh while trying to save her marriage in 2006.
Buresh was deeply spiritual, and she found his sermons comforting. He had lengthy conversations with her about the problems in her marriage, both in counseling sessions and outside of them.
Soon, Olivia said, he began leaving notes on her windshield while she was at work.
After Olivia’s divorce was finalized in 2008, she started formally dating Buresh, who was serving as the pastor of a Lutheran church affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire at that time.
Not long into their relationship, Buresh accused her of cheating, Olivia said. He started throwing framed photos and pillows across the room during arguments. His love of guns evolved into more of an obsession.
Olivia said Buresh also used sex as a weapon.
“He taunted me and threw it in my face that the ELCA wasn’t going to do anything, so he could do anything he wanted to me,” Olivia said.
He started holding guns to her head and threatening her, according to Olivia. In 2017, she said she kicked Buresh out of their home and ended their relationship.
Then Buresh began following her, Olivia said. Things came to a head that October when she noticed someone following her in an unfamiliar car. When officers pulled the car over, they found Buresh with a loaded gun on the front seat, police records show.
“I know with every ounce of my being, if I had pulled over and confronted him on that night, that I wouldn’t be here to tell my story,” Olivia said.
Buresh was charged with harassment, but the charge was later dismissed by a St. Croix County judge.
At that time, Buresh was a pastor at Peace Lutheran in Dresser, a rural town just north of New Richmond.
That year, Olivia met with Hoyme, the bishop of the Northwest Synod of Wisconsin, and told him about Buresh’s abuse, unaware that Amelia had reported a similar story months prior.
Olivia hoped the synod would launch a comprehensive investigation into Buresh. Instead, she said Hoyme told her Buresh had already resigned and was no longer under the church’s purview.
To Olivia, it felt like the church was shuffling off responsibility.
Hoyme did not respond to requests for comment by phone or social media.
In response to Olivia’s story, Buchbinder said it is “deeply unfortunate” that Buresh convinced her the church would not be responsive.”
“This was not an accurate understanding,” Buchbinder said.
Churches slow to address issue of adult abuse by clergy, expert says
Unknown to Amelia and Olivia, Buresh had struck up a relationship with a third woman while he was a pastor at Peace Lutheran in Wisconsin.
Sophia said she met Buresh in 2015. He helped her get a job with the church – one that she loved, but that also resulted in the two of them having time alone together.
Like Olivia, she also began attending counseling with Buresh. During the sessions, Sophia said Buresh helped her talk through her failing marriage and the recent death of her mother.
Buresh quickly began to escalate the relationship, sending Sophia messages on Facebook with Bible verses and scripture, along with intimate questions and comments, according to the complaint in a criminal case later filed against him.
Buresh went on to initiate a physical relationship, pressuring Sophia until she relented, she said.
Then, Buresh found out someone had reported him to the head of the ELCA. He accused Sophia of telling the church about their relationship, though she said she knew nothing of the disclosure.
“His messages turned ugly and scary,” she said.
Abusive pastors often use counseling as a way in with the women they target, said David Pooler, a clergy abuse researcher at Baylor University. Pooler served as an expert witness in a civil case Sophia filed against Buresh and the ELCA in 2020.
According to Pooler, it’s more common for people to seek out a member of the clergy before a therapist. In research he’s conducted, 60% of those abused by a pastor or priest were receiving some sort of counseling.
Pooler said pastors and priests are often held as examples of God. For particularly devout churchgoers, receiving guidance from a pastor can be equivalent to receiving advice from God.
“Clergy have enormous amounts of power,” Pooler said.
Although there has been a wave of action to address child sex abuse by clergy, addressing adult abuse has been slower, he said. Adult abuse is easier for perpetrators to pass off as an affair, and there can be a tendency for churches not to take claims as seriously as they should, Pooler said.
“I would say the ELCA in this case was far more interested in taking the easy path,” Pooler said. “They were far more interested in just maintaining their own reputation and image.”
Olivia, Amelia and Sophia, who were all married at the time they met Buresh, said they delayed coming forward because they were afraid their situation would be seen as an affair rather than abuse perpetrated by a trusted authority figure.
“You hear so much about children. We understand they’re vulnerable. But people don’t understand the power differential there, even with adults, and the abuse of power and trust,” Amelia said. “He manipulated us.”
The three women ended up connecting with each other in 2018, shortly after Sophia went on a mission trip with Olivia. While chatting about their lives, they said they came to realize they had endured abuse by the same man.
“I found out I am not the first person that this has happened to and he had pattern behavior,” Sophia said. “That had been going on and nothing was ever done about it.”
Amelia, Sophia and Olivia arranged a meeting with the ELCA in 2019 in Minneapolis. There, they asked that the church do a better job at implementing its zero tolerance policy for abuse, and to provide more resources to survivors.
The women also brought up the church in Minnesota that was still allowing Buresh to minister online. As a result, the bishop of Southwestern Synod of Minnesota advised the congregation to stop the sermons.
“It is not healthy to be stuck in the past,” Bishop Jon Anderson wrote in a letter to Amo Lutheran. Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.
But otherwise, the women said they never heard back from the ELCA about their requests.
According to Buchbinder, one of the women threatened legal action after the meeting, forcing all further communication to go through lawyers.
‘It has taken all this time’
In 2020, Sophia decided to report Buresh to police, accusing him of exploiting his position as a counselor to coerce her into sex.
Buresh pleaded no contest to a charge of fourth-degree sexual assault and was sentenced to two years of probation and required to register as a sex offender.
Sophia also pursued a civil case against Buresh, the Northwest Synod of Wisconsin and the ELCA, alleging that the organization allowed Buresh to keep ministering despite Charlotte’s claims she had reported his violent behavior to church leaders.
“I don’t want to look back and think I should have done or said more,” Sophia said.
In depositions, a sixth woman came forward and said she had been a victim of Buresh’s abuse and had reported it to the ELCA, according to several women who participated in depositions. The woman declined to speak to the Journal Sentinel.
Boz Tchividjian, an attorney specializing in adult clergy abuse who represented Sophia in her civil case, said it was difficult to parse out who knew what in the organization.
ELCA guidelines require synods to communicate abuse claims to other synods if the alleged behavior has occurred in more than one synod, but it was unclear if they did so, Tchividjian said.
“It was a bit of pointing fingers at each other, going, ‘Well, we didn’t know because they didn’t tell us,’” he said. “And you might get someone else who says ‘Well, yeah, we told them, but that person who told us is no longer around.’”
The ELCA does not require regional leaders to report misconduct allegations up to the national organization, making it easier for abusive pastors to move from church to church.
Pooler, the clergy abuse researcher, called that an “institutional failure around accountability.”
“If a denomination has a system of government where there is a national organization, they should indeed be keeping track of accused ministers, the outcome of investigations, and any disciplinary actions,” he said.
As the court cases moved forward, Buresh was still able to meet another woman online — Evelyn, who ultimately ended up being held captive by Buresh in Iowa.
Like the others, Evelyn connected with Buresh over long conversations about spirituality, though she herself wasn’t religious. In an interview in 2024, Evelyn said Buresh often talked about how important his job as a pastor was, even though he had resigned.
“He felt a lot of pride in the fact that he was a pastor,” she said. “It was very meaningful for him.”
In 2022, Buresh surprised Evelyn by suddenly moving to Iowa. She soon realized Buresh had an extensive gun collection, even though he wasn’t supposed to own them after his conviction.
Then, Buresh began to “lose his grip,” she said.
“He would get his guns out and hold up a gun to my head. He would threaten me, take away the keys to my car and back me into a corner.”
She had been trying to end their relationship when Buresh broke into her home that February afternoon in 2022.
After he fired the shot into the ceiling, Evelyn said, she ran out of the house and hid behind a tree near her home. When police arrived, they had to coax her to safety.
A police standoff ensued. Buresh barricaded himself inside the home for five hours until police threw a chemical agent inside to force him out.
Buresh was charged with burglary, the reckless use of a firearm and interference with official acts by use of a gun. In 2022, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
He will be eligible to apply for parole in August, after serving just under three years.
Evelyn moved out of her home. The damage from Buresh and the chemical agent left it unlivable, she said, in addition to the traumatic memories the incident left behind.
“It has taken all this time — years — to get my sense of self back,” Evelyn said.
Sophia’s civil case was settled by the church in 2023, less than a week before the jury trial was scheduled to begin. The terms of the settlement and all the documents in the case were sealed.
Sophia said her relationship with the church has changed, eroding a trust she felt for her religion since she was a child.
“I know I won’t be the person I was before all of this happened,” she said. “But I just hope in the weeks and months and years to come, that it will start to feel a little bit further away.”
Charlotte, Olivia and Amelia distanced themselves from the church too. They say most of the support they’ve gotten hasn’t come from the ELCA, but from each other.
As they slowly rebuild their lives, they are drawing courage from the knowledge they’re not alone.
“It was a lifeline,” Charlotte said. “It’s astounding, it’s validating. I use the words from the other women like a mantra, and I’m able to believe what happened to me.”
Laura Schulte is a government and environmental reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at leschulte@jrn.com.
Resources for survivors of clergy or faith leader abuse
- The Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office is investigating clergy abuse claims. You can report abuse using the online tool at www.supportsurvivors.widoj.gov or by calling 1-877-222-2620. Victims and survivors will be connected with resources and services and the Wisconsin Department of Justice will review the allegations to determine if criminal investigation is appropriate.
- Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, is a support group for people who have been abused by religious and institutional leaders, including priests, ministers, coaches, teachers, and others. Learn more at www.snapnetwork.org.
- To contact the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with tips, email Laura Schulte at leschulte@jrn.com or the watchdog team at wisconsininvestigates@gannett.com.