Funeral Saturday for Rev. Raymond Nickel

Funeral services will be held Saturday for the Rev. Raymond Louis Nickel, who founded Orange County’s first Lutheran Church in America. Nickel died of prostate cancer and kidney failure Friday at FHP Hospital in Fountain Valley. He was 70.

After serving at two churches in Ohio, Nickel moved to Santa Ana in 1951 to start United Lutheran Church, the first of the Lutheran Church in America congregations in the county. By 1988, the county had 13 such congregations.

When the family moved from Ohio, it lived “pretty much on a shoestring,” said Nickel’s son, John R. Nickel. “They ate on beans for weeks. He always put the church’s needs first,” he said.

For its first few years, the church operated out of a women’s club in Santa Ana. In 1953, United Lutheran Church was completed at 1416 S. Bristol St. in Santa Ana.

Although the church started with fewer than 10 families, it grew to about 300 families during the Vietnam War, John Nickel said.

“It’s a very traditional type of church,” he said, adding that many military families joined the church during the Vietnam War. Since then, as more families moved to South County, membership dwindled.

The Lutheran Church in America merged with the middle-of-the-road American Lutheran Church and the Assn. of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in 1988 to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The churches had originated along German and Scandinavian divisions. All together, the ELCA is considered more moderate than the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a theologically and politically conservative denomination.

Nickel was born on Oct. 15, 1919, in Vandalia, Ohio. In 1945, he married Betty Lou Creamer of Springfield, Ohio, who is now the principal of Jose Sepulveda Elementary School in Santa Ana. He attended Wittenburg University in Springfield, Ohio, and graduated from the Hamma School of Divinity with a master’s degree in 1945.

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by daughtersMarilyn Dobbs of Indianapolis and Julianne Preston of Hesperia, Calif.; brothers Vernon Nickel of Mooresville, N.C., Kenneth Nickel of Jamestown, Ky., and Henry Nickel of Portsmith, N.H., and four grandchildren.

Services will be at noon Saturday at United Lutheran Church in Santa Ana. Graveside services will follow at Fairhaven Memorial Park, 1702 Fairhaven Ave.

The family requests that donations can be made to the American Cancer Society in his name.