H. Ganse Little; Headed Presbyterian Church

The Rev. H. Ganse Little, a vocal liberal voice in Presbyterian church affairs who in 1966 was elected to his denomination’s highest office, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 85 and had moved east from Pasadena after retiring.

Little, who retired as pastor of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church in 1969, had held pastorates in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio before coming to Pasadena in 1952.

After retiring he moved to New York and joined the Presbyterian General Assembly’s Board of National Missions.

Little, who held graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary, was a fourth-generation minister--his father, both grandfathers and three of four great-grandfathers were Presbyterian ministers.

He was president of the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education from 1949 to 1961 and a frequent speaker at university campuses, many of which gave him honorary degrees.

Little was heard over the National Radio Pulpit in the mid-1950s and served as an exchange minister in England and Scotland under the auspices of the British Council of Churches.

He was a delegate to the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi in 1961 and in Boston in 1966 was installed as moderator of the 178th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. At that time the church had 3.3 million members.

In Pasadena he had succeeded Eugene Carson Blake, who went on to become general secretary of the World Council of Churches.

In the late 1940s, Little was among the first to urge the establishment of human relations commissions in American cities and became the head of Pasadena’s first such group.

Survivors include his wife, Virginia, a son, a sister, a brother and three grandsons.