By James Janega, Staff Writer / Chicago Tribune, February 9, 2001
Every Sunday morning since the 1960s, the salvation motorcade has issued forth: hundreds of buses scouring the Chicago area as far north as Waukegan to bring the faithful--some of them on-the-spot converts--to the First Baptist Church and Sunday school in Hammond, Ind.
Each week, tens of thousands flocked to First Baptist services led by Rev. Jack Hyles, the fundamentalist and often controversial Baptist preacher who put his church, and the concept of bus ministry, on the religious map.
Rev. Hyles, 74, who used the buses to create the first megachurch in the Chicago area, and in the process led other inner-city churches to do the same in the 1960s and '70s, died Tuesday, Feb. 6, in University of Chicago Hospitals, where he was undergoing open-heart surgery.
"Dr. Hyles will be remembered as a leader in evangelism through the local church," said Rev. Jerry Falwell, televangelist and chancellor of Liberty University. "He inspired me as a young pastor to win others to Christ through Sunday school, the pulpit and personal witnessing. He made a great contribution to the calls of Christ."
With homespun humor and uncompromising religious fervor, Rev. Hyles enunciated a clear and deeply conservative vision of how his church should be run. Smoking and drinking were out, of course, as were dancing and hand-holding for unmarried couples.
But it was his literal interpretation of the Bible that often put him at odds even with other fundamentalist Baptists.
During his career, he split with both the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Convention.
When he first came to Hammond in 1959, the preacher who had packed new converts into his former Texas congregations sent liberal Northern churchgoers fleeing. But he quickly turned things around, first by going door to door for new followers, then by sending the buses when distances got too far.
Some 20,000 people now attend church services and Sunday school each week at First Baptist, which also serves as the parent congregation for the Hammond Baptist Schools, Hyles-Anderson College and the Hyles Publications religious press.
"In many ways, he was larger than life," said Hammond Mayor Duane Dedelow Jr. "He had a tremendous following at his church, but when other people were moving out of downtown Hammond, the reverend decided to stay. Many of his congregation lived in Hammond, so I would say he had a very important impact here."
Raised in a poverty-stricken area of Dallas, Rev. Hyles often described a less-than-ideal childhood with distant parents. Drafted into the Army after high school, he was married during that period to the former Beverly Slaughter.
He graduated from East Texas Baptist College after the war and set out preaching in small Texas congregations, all of which soon got large.
"His churches always grew," said Wendell Evans, president of Hyles-Anderson College. "He was very godly, but very practical. He had tremendous charisma and was a good businessman, and you wanted to work for him. You wanted to work hard for him."
The largest of those 1950s congregations was the Miller Road Baptist Church in Garland, Texas, which grew from a membership of 44 to 4,000. Though his success initially gained him wide admiration among Southern Baptists, Rev. Hyles later split from the group over theological differences, opting instead to run Miller Road as an independent preacher.
Rev. Hyles hated the word "minister," Evans said, finding it too "sissified."
After being invited to head the then-high society First Baptist Church in Hammond, he presided over a mass defection of its tonier membership that diminished its 700-person congregation by a third. Soon afterward, he led the church out of the American Baptist Conference and initiated his extensive bus ministry.
The author of 48 self-published treatises on theology with a circulation of more than 14 million copies, Rev. Hyles founded the Hammond Baptist Schools in 1970 and Hyles-Anderson College in Crown Point, Ind., in 1972.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by daughters Becky Smith, Linda Murphrey and Cindy Schaap; a son, David; a sister, Earlyne Stephens; 11 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Visitation for Rev. Hyles will be from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Friday in the First Baptist Church, 523 Sibley St., followed by a 7 p.m. memorial service in the church for non-church members. A funeral service for church members will be at 10 a.m. Saturday in the church.