led the church to its status as an independent Baptist church—freeing it from its ties with the American Baptists. Hyles started his bus ministry and soon shepherded the church from a congregation of several hundred to more than 20,000. In the early 1990s a national survey ranked First Baptist as the largest church in the nation, by average weekly attendance figures. Beginning in 1969, and continuing for several years, First Baptist received recognition for the size of its Sunday School. In 1969, Elmer Towns wrote a book called The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow which analyzed First Baptist's Sunday School. Towns presented a plaque to Hyles in 1971, naming First Baptist Church of Hammond the nation's largest Sunday school. In 1972, and for several years following, Christian Life Magazine proclaimed First Baptist Church of Hammond to have "the world's largest Sunday School". In 1972, Jack Hyles and Russell Anderson founded Hyles–Anderson College, an unaccredited Bible college, to specialize in training Baptist ministers and Christian school teachers. Hyles–Anderson College never sought accreditation because Hyles insisted school accreditation would undermine his ability to control how the college ought to run. Ministry One of the most notable aspects of Hyles' work is his church bus ministry that he helped innovate. As early as 1975, Time magazine described the phenomenon in an article titled, "Superchurch." The Time article notes that First Baptist Church of Hammond Sunday School, which regularly ran almost 14,000 people, pushed the church to a record attendance of 30,560 on March 16, 1975, thanks to a boisterous contest between two bus route teams. In that year, the First Baptist bus route ministry consisted of 1,000 workers using 230 buses to ferry as many as 10,000 people every Sunday. In 2001, a fleet of over 200 buses was regularly ferrying 7,000 to 15,000 people from all over the area. Hyles spoke at The Sword of the Lord conferences with John R. Rice and his own annual "Pastor's School". The school continues to attract as many as seven thousand annual visitors to the Hammond area. Hyles wrote approximately fifty works in his lifetime with over 14 million total copies in circulation, including the popular Is There A Hell?, based on a sermon he preached at a National Sword of the Lord Conference. Another work, Enemies of Soul Winning tackled many issues considered controversial in fundamentalist and evangelical circles, which