Audrey Hicks
RONAN — Audrey Hicks, formerly of Glacier Lily Lane, Ronan, passed away on Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012, at Highgate Senior Living in Bozeman.
Born Audrey Pearle Fraser on April 30, 1925, in Nashwaak Bridge, New Brunswick, Audrey was the eldest of Elmer and Ada Fraser’s four daughters. When Audrey was five years old, her family moved from her father’s ancestral home on the Nashwaak to find work in Detroit, Mich. and eventually established a home in Clawson, Mich. Audrey attended the Log Cabin High School in nearby Troy, and married her husband Vern Hicks in Clawson on May 3, 1947 upon graduating from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Ill., where the two met.
Audrey and Vern were involved in the early days of Billy Graham’s Youth For Christ Ministry in Chicago and Vern obtained his first appointment as youth pastor at a Baptist Church in Pontiac, Mich., where their first son David was born in 1948. Audrey and Vern moved to Minnesota in 1949, where Vern pastored Baptist and Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in Parkers Prairie and Forest Lake. With three more sons born in Minnesota, Douglas, Scot, and Todd, Audrey and Vern ventured back to Audrey’s native New Brunswick to start a C&MA church in Moncton in 1960. Audrey completed a nursing course in Moncton and served as an R.N.A. in Chatham, Ontario, where Vern was called to pastor the Alliance Church from 1964 to 1970, and where they were at last rewarded with the birth of a daughter, Sara, in 1968. Sara was soon joined by Joe, whom Audrey and Vern adopted in Colonie, N.Y., where Vern pastored the C&MA church from 1970 to 1973, before moving to Ronan.
In Ronan Vern and Audrey ministered at the Christian and Missionary Alliance church and then the Community Fellowship for over thirty years, living first at the C&MA parsonage on 3rd Avenue N.W., then at a log home they built three miles east of town on the road that Audrey would eventually name Glacier Lily Lane. Audrey worked as a copy editor at the Ronan Pioneer, and Audrey and Vern were instrumental in founding Mission Valley Christian Academy. But Audrey’s most profound mark on the community was made by the quality of her friendships with the women and children of the valley. In the last few years, Audrey and Vern lived with family in Ronan and Bozeman before going into an assisted living facility in Bozeman.
Her loving husband Vern, her sisters Darlene, Noreen, and Shirley, her six children David, Douglas, Scot, Todd, Sara, and Joe, twenty-one grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren survive Audrey.
Services will be held at 11a.m., Thursday, Oct. 4, at the Community Fellowship, in Ronan. Visitation and viewing will also held at the Community Fellowship from 4-7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3.
