Jack Hyles

Jack Frasure Hyles was born and raised in Italy, Texas, a poor town south of Dallas. When he was 18 years old, he enlisted in the United States Army and served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division during World War II. He married his wife Beverly during the war. After World War II, Hyles completed his college education at East Texas Baptist College in Marshall, TX. After graduating, he preached at several small Texas churches, then pastored at the Miller Road Baptist Church in Garland, TX for about six years, where the congregation grew to 4,000 members. During this period he left the Southern Baptist Convention and became an independent Baptist. He led Miller Road Baptist Church as an independent preacher, then, in 1959, he moved to Munster, IN to become pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond. He broke the church off from the American Baptist denomination, establishing it as an independent Baptist church. He started a bus ministry (picking up worshippers and bringing them to the church), which helped grow his congregation to more than 20,000 members. First Baptist Church of Hammond was one of the first churches to be called a "superchurch", and peaked at 30,560 attendees in March of 1975. In 1972, and for several years following, Christian Life Magazine proclaimed First Baptist Church of Hammond to have "the world's largest Sunday School", which was attended by almost 14,000 weekly. In the early 1990s First Baptist Church of Hammond was still the largest church in the nation. In 1972, Jack Hyles co-founded Hyles-Anderson College with Russell Anderson. This unaccredited bible college specialized in training Baptist ministers and Christian school teachers. In 2001, his childhood home was shipped from Texas to Hyles-Anderson College and became a museum to Jack Hyles. Hyles wrote approximately fifty works in his lifetime, including the popular Is There A Hell?, based on a sermon he preached at a National Sword of the Lord Conference. He remained pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond until his death in 2001.