Before the first glinting rays of Sunday hit the steel mills surrounding Hammond, Ind., the vanguard of 1,000 bus volunteers check in. Soon 230 blue-and-white First Baptist Church buses are plying routes across northern Indiana and South Side Chicago, and before the morning is over the drivers will have hauled as many as 10,000 persons to what foot-high signs on the sides of the buses hail as the WORLD'S LARGEST SUNDAY SCHOOL.
The claim is rock solid for the U.S., if not the world. According to Christian Life magazine's annual survey, no church comes close to First Baptist in Sunday school attendance. It draws an incredible average weekly turnout of nearly 14,000.*
Hammond's Baptists, hard-shell fundamentalist, use liberal doses of Barnumism that would make less exuberant Christians blush. A "battle" between two competing bus teams, spurred on by bands and flags, rocketed attendance last March 16 to a record 30,560. This fall's attendance drive has featured a man on stilts inviting squealing moppets into the church, free goldfish, and ice cream sundaes for sixth-graders. Past bait has included zoo trips, picnics, even horseback rides.
"We'll trade a horseback ride any time for the opportunity to teach the Bible," says Bus Minister Jim Vineyard, who marshals the weekly ingathering. "We've been accused of bribing kids to come to church, but a bribe is a payment to get someone to do wrong. We're getting them to do right."
With soul-saving zeal, First Baptist welcomes deaf and retarded children, as well as a surprising number of Chicago street toughs, some of whom come equipped with clubs, knives and chains that have to be wrested away from them. For small troublemakers, Vineyard keeps a paddle handy. Explains one deacon blandly: "We ram respect and discipline down their throats." And more. First Baptist insists on short hair ("cut so that it is at least one finger-width above the eyebrows"). Primness also counts at the church's elementary and high schools and at its three-year-old, unaccredited Hyles-Anderson College, where a boy may not sit on a piano bench next to a girl, or touch her.
"I think a lot of people in this country are hungry for what we call decency," says Pastor Jack Hyles, 49, the preacher-impresario who made First Baptist No. 1. If decency alone will not hold a crowd, he makes sure theatrical oratory will. In the course of Sunday worship, Hyles shouts, whispers, jokes, cries. "It's a rare sermon when I don't weep," he says.
Spellbinder Hyles was anything but that in his first stuttering try at preaching in 1947. "Elijah blushed and Heaven's flag flew at half-mast for three days," he says. In classic bootstrap style, Hyles proceeded to enroll in speech courses while clerking at J.C. Penney's in Marshall, Texas. Before long, he was wowing audiences with a folksy, rip-roaring delivery. He took a church and was summoned to the Hammond pulpit in 1959.