whispering pines

By Karen L. Willoughby

GRANGEVILLE, Idaho – Marshall Hickman knows the rural Idaho culture because he grew up in it. He knows the back roads of north-central Idaho because he drove them when marketing real estate. He knows the gospel of grace because he lived it as a missionary.

Hickman is new as Director of Missions for the Whispering Pines Baptist Association. He started Feb. 1.

“My wife Linda and I have been traveling every Sunday to one of the ten churches in the association,” Hickman told UI Connections. “We get there in time for Sunday School, take just a few minutes during worship to introduce the Director of Missions position and introduce myself. It’s been a get-oriented time right now.”

Hickman was to meet with former DOM Lee Mowery the same day he talked with UI Connections in early April. The new DOM “wanted to see what needs to be done that I might not be aware of.  In my opinion Pastor Lee is one of the most marvelous Christian men I’ve ever met.”

Lee currently serves as the interim pastor at Orofino (Idaho) Baptist Church.

Whispering Pines Baptist Association covers three counties: Clearwater, Lewis and Idaho. It’s north of the “square” part of Idaho but Hickman said it wasn’t yet in the state’s “panhandle.” Others might say it’s at the bottom of it. Whispering Pines stretches from Moscow to Riggins, and from the Washington and Oregon state lines east about 100 rural miles.

“I grew up on a farm,” Hickman said. “I speak the [cultural] language because I grew up working elbow to elbow with men and women who worked hard.”

Hickman doesn’t come from a Southern Baptist background, but he said he’s glad he found the SBC five years ago at Redeemer Baptist Church in Grangeville, restarted in 2020 by Matt Claridge.

“We value the gospel of grace. Matt preaches that,” Hickman said. “We’ve actually been ‘signed-up Baptists’ for five years and don’t plan on going anywhere else. We love it!”

Hickman was 22 when he made a profession of faith in Jesus. It was the time of hippies and Jesus People. As he says, “I started calling on the name of the Lord and He came to me,” after attending a prayer meeting.

Soon called to overseas missions, the Hickman family served as independent “faith” missionaries who developed their own support to serve in China, Taiwan and Cambodia.

They first left the U.S. in 1988, for Hickman to serve (as a tentmaking missionary) teacher of English as a Second Language at a petrochemical plant in Lanzhou, north-central China, for nine months before scooting out of the country after the Tiananmen massacre of college student protesters in Beijing resulted in national unrest.

The Hickman family returned to China in October 1989, where he taught trade and commerce courses in English at Shenzhen University in mainland China near Hong Kong. His apartment home served as a drop-off point for smuggled Bibles and literature to be distributed in southern China, and there he and his family co-hosted an underground house church for 2.5 years, during which 27 people were baptized.

“There was just a lot of hunger for God’s Word,” Hickman said. “I think we were watering what other missionaries had planted in the early 1900s.”

Their time in Taiwan started in 1995 with Hickman teaching at a university in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and his wife at a Christian international school. Two years later he was called by Friendship Presbyterian Church, attended mostly by English speakers working in Taiwan. The Hickman family returned to Nampa in 2001 to care for his seriously ill father.

Over the next seven years, Hickman earned his third master’s degree, in professional counseling, while building houses. He went to Cambodia on a six-month missions trip working with a Christian non-profit to get children rescued from illegal orphanages – more correctly called child trafficking warehouses – into the care of qualified Cambodian families.

Upon his return, Hickman worked in Meridian, Idaho, from 2010-16 as a licensed professional Christian counselor and hospice chaplain.

“Living ‘by faith’ in cross-cultural ministry is living in the infinite potential available to those who believe that nothing is too hard for God,” Hickman said. “Tent-making positions, earning a living in otherwise closed or difficult cross-cultural settings, often is adequate to live in the local economy. 

“And financial sufficiency for the Lord’s servants is very often a witness of the glory of God revealed in response to faith in Christ and His Word,” the Director of Missions continued. “We were dependent upon the God of all power, love, and faithfulness in a glimpse of His glory, not upon people.  As the Spirit of God spoke to the hearts of believers we knew in various capacities, funds were released.”

The Hickman family always made sure to be associated with a parachurch organization that took responsibility for financial affairs seriously, including being in conformity with income tax reporting requirements, the DOM said.

Marshall and Linda Hickman moved from Meridian to Grangeville to live near one of their daughters, and became part of the Redeemer Church restart.

“Marshall brings a wealth of experience in ministry and foreign missions – China, Taiwan, and Cambodia – to his role as the Associational Director of Missions of the Whispering Pines Association,” Matt Claridge told UI Connections. Claridge is pastor of Redeemer Church in Grangeville. “Although he’s coming from outside SBC circles, his faithful commitment to my own church and his heart for pastoral care speaks for itself.

“Marshall subscribes to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 in its entirety,” Claridge continued. “I led the way in encouraging our Association to give Marshall a look, and so far he’s risen to the challenge with wisdom and grace.”