The following article is reprinted with permission from Cornerstone Magazine. It is taken from an article titled, "Hammond Baptist Culture Club" by Mike Hertenstein [Cornerstone Archives, Issue #81]. It shows one person's view of the methods used by the so-called "soul winners" who go out on Saturday mornings to rake in children and and gain "decisions".

"The World's Largest Sunday School." First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, sends a fleet of school buses as far as sixty miles away to bring up to ten thousand riders to the church every Sunday.

Breathing fire, brimstone, and good grooming, the Hammond bus workers have long recruited youthful riders from Chicago's poor Uptown neighborhood. And since the area's latest influx of Indochinese refugees, many of these have been Vietnamese, Laotion, and Cambodian.

Shari first heard of the church two years ago from her kids who'd been there. Some complained of riding the bus thirty miles to Hammond and returning hours later hungry and sick. Others were upset by their Sunday school lessons: Cambodia fell to the communists because of Buddhism, girls who wear pants will burn in hell. A few seemed to think they must now stop listening to their parents.

More than one felt unsure whether they or their parents really wanted them to be going to Hammond at all.

Upon investigating, the kids' teacher found that both children and adults were intimidated by the bus workers' hard sell approach. Candy and other prizes were offered if children would ride the buses. The few Khmers who overcame a cultural inability to say NO! to pushy Americans found the church people refused to accept that answer.

As Fenton wrote on a fact sheet distributed in the neighborhoods, kids told her "they sometimes hide in closets, under beds, or run out the back door to avoid church people."

Efforts were made by Cambodian Association of Illinois (CAI) to contact the church. But asking Hammond Baptist soul winners to lay off, they found, is like asking Dick Clark to get old. The bus workers kept right on knocking on doors, even if they had to first rip off one of the "non consent" forms that Fenton had helped parents sign and post.

Chicago Police were called. But Area 6 Youth officers, who patrolled the Khmer neighborhoods a few Sundays last summer, found no evidence of unlawful activities. Neither could they find any parents who would file a formal complaint. Without one or the other, police explained, they could do nothing.

The conflict escalated. Letters were exchanged last fall between lawyers. CAI attorneys warned the Hammond church not to use coercion to fill its buses. The Baptist lawyer returned that if anybody was using coercion, it was the Cambodian Association whom he had heard was stopping kids from boarding the buses. If the best interests of the Cambodian community are not served by isolation, he asserted, and closed with a veiled litigious threat.

Finally, after a year of fruitless contacts with various law enforcement officials, Cambodian leaders and refugee workers decided their only recourse lie in community education. Dean  met with Cambodians and wrote fact sheets on the role of police and the rights of citizens. Asian Human Services enlisted volunteers to visit Khmer buildings on Sundays and support parents in saying NO.

A local college offered this role playing activity in a refugee class on "Resisting Zealous Missionaries":

Stranger at the door: Knock, Knock. Anybody home?

Potential victim: Who's there?

S: I'm Brother Roberts from the United Church of Goshin, Iowa.

V: What do you want?

S: I want to take you to church ....

V: No, thank you. I'm not interested ....

Are you from the Cambodian Association or The Press?" The questioner was a Baptist bus captain. He sat waiting in the Uptown parking lot where the Hammond buses rendezvous before sweeping the neighborhood. "You're welcome to come to church," said the captain. "But we've been instructed to say that no one may observe the Cambodian Sunday School classes without verbal permission from Dr. Hyles."

There it is. Most of those parties who have pursued dialogue with the Hammond Church on the Cambodian issue have met with unanswered letters, unreturned calls, unlisted phone numbers, and refusal to comment. The rest have been pointed to Jack Hyles.

And to understand the First Baptist Church at all, agrees the author of "The World's Largest Sunday School," one must first understand its pastor. "Surely," enthuses Elmer Towns, "the church has his character laundry marked in its program and outreach."

Some of that character may be discerned in the stock of the First Baptist bookstore at least Hyles' demand for absolute purity in matters of doctrine and personal hygiene. There are volumes by strict fundamentalists, anti- Catholic diatribes like "Two Babylons" (Nimrod = the Pope), and dozens of Hyles' own books and pamphlets, including an essay called "Jesus Had Short Hair."

Weekly attendance at Hammond registered 720 and was declining when Jack Hyles was called up from Texas twenty-seven years ago. On his way to pushing that average to thirty thousand per week, Hyles founded a college, wrote a score of books, and inspired fundamentalist folk across the nation.

Pastor Hyles enjoys his reputation as an independent thinker, and so his response to the concerns of the Cambodian Association of Illinois is typical of him: "It's none of their business."

The subject came up during one of those brief interviews Dr. Hyles gives after church, when people line up outside his office for a bit of time and advice.

Now about the complaints on this sheet ....

"I don't want to see that," he snapped and stepped back.

Despite a howdy- partner accent, Hyles' expression falls naturally into a piercing glare. "What complaints?"

Children taken without parents' permission.

"That's a lie!"

Kids abused for talking in Sunday school.

"That's a filthy lie!" he scorned, then demanded, "Where's the proof?"

Well, all these kids at the Cambodian Center have said ....

"Yeah, and I've heard kids say they saw a man come from the sky with wings and a horn on his head," he laughed, opening the door for the pesky devil's advocate. "Kids will say anything."

The darndest things. But they better not say them during Sunday school. In a nearby auditorium, as a Hyles disciple preaches the usual approach--invokes visions of burning hell and auto wrecks that may send us there any second--five hundred bus kids in the "C" Sunday school are scrutinized by workers posted in the aisles.

Any congregant who fails to sit quietly before the preaching and pleasant Baptist girls singing ancient Baptist hymns may get an index finger from the nearest worker and a

"YOU!! BE QUIET!"

Further shenanigans may result in bodily ejection from the proceedings.

(Shari Fenton wondered how the Baptists keep order among thousands when she can't prevent chaos with dozens.)

At Hammond Baptist order is maintained via stern finger- pointers and bus numbers marked carefully on the backs of riders' hands. Those who get saved are corralled into the adults' service, past several checkpoints on the authenticity of their confession, and baptized immediately--one right after the other, their final destinies eternally secured.

….

"The only reason we're here is to get people saved," Jack Hyles explained in a recent sermon. "We're supposed to read the Bible, but that's for the same reason we eat' to have strength to reproduce. We're supposed to be nice, we're supposed to be courteous' but that's just to get people saved."