Thom Hickling, an offbeat evangelical who influenced the Christian community in Pittsburgh through his creation of Expression newspaper and the His Place television show, died yesterday in a car crash in Zambia.
Mr. Hickling, 51, was visiting his daughter, Holly, 23 who was doing mission work in a refugee camp in that African nation. Her leg was broken in the crash and she is to fly back to Pittsburgh tomorrow. His body is still in Zambia. Services will eventually be held in Pittsburgh and in Baltimore, where he had lived since 1997.
Mr. Hickling, his daughter, and another worker from the refugee camp were on a two-lane highway when they were struck head-on by another vehicle. The first news his family heard of it was when his former wife, Cathy, received a phone call from a passer-by who said he had found "a dead white man in a car registered to Holly Hickling." The U.S. State Department helped them confirm that the dead man was Mr. Hickling, and to locate Holly in a hospital, Cathy Hickling said.
During their 20-year marriage, the Hicklings introduced Pittsburgh to contemporary Christian music through their singing and through his father's radio station. They ran Expression, a Christian newspaper that crossed many denominational and cultural lines, and they co-created His Place, a ground-breaking Christian talk show that was also part soap opera. Mr. Hickling was the pony-tailed man who often interviewed guests on His Place but was best known for a segment in which he read letters from viewers and made a comedy shtick out of reading the ZIP code for Cornerstone Television.
Through a life that was often difficult, Mr. Hickling "stayed very, very faithful to Christ and to a view of Christ's kingdom that had justice and compassion for the poor very central to his understanding of the holy drama," said Reid Carpenter of Sewickley, president of the Leadership Foundations of America and a longtime lay leader in Pittsburgh's evangelical community.
"Within the evangelical world he was pretty radical, and he had a very, very acute taste for the outsider, and a heart for communicating the good news in a variety of different forms and forums."
More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
First Published: December 28, 2005, 5:00 a.m.
