A week ago, the Fundamental Baptist Podcast, hosted by David Baker, posted an episode in which Dave Hyles refuted his sister Linda’s now-famous claims about her father Jack Hyles. This has been a long time coming. Linda gave her TED talk in 2012 – more than a dozen years ago. So one might wonder why Dave waited so long to answer it. Maybe he had other affairs to attend to…
There is a reason why we keep our dumpsters out of sight, far removed from our places of business. Besides those especially ripe fragrances that surround it, we find ourselves stepping carefully, the closer we get, lest we step into a puddle that wasn’t caused by any rain. The liquids that ooze out from beneath the dumpster have a way of staying on your shoes, and nobody wants to track that around.
Even so, it seems impossible to come near the Hyles airspace without getting a little dumpster jam on your clothes. It’s a stench you can’t shake, and nobody wants to smell like that. And the Fundamental Baptist Podcast is like a steaming mess of toxic fumes. As just one sample of the rotting mess from this podcast, neither David Baker nor Dave Hyles believes repentance to be a necessary step to restoration – “We start the restoration process before they repent.” Vintage. Don’t nobody look at 2 Corinthians 7:8-12.
I won’t pretend to give an insider’s view of the Hyles mess. I did a year’s time in the very dumpster itself, and God delivered me from it. Before my year at Hyles-Anderson, I grew up in a Hyles church – now defunct – where the predictable happened right on schedule. So, I know that world, but I won’t pretend to have any kind of connection to the family. Hyles has a few defenders left – I call them “Hylots” – and for them, Dave’s refutation of Linda is a godsend. This little article will be for the rest of us, who haven’t gotten tired of pointing out the poisonous fumes seeping from the dumpster.
Years ago when Robert Sumner wrote the earliest exposes on Jack Hyles in his paper, The Biblical Evangelist, I was fully engaged in the Hyles orbit. Sumner’s revelations rocked our world. Our youth group traveled to Youth Conference in Hammond every summer. Most of our teens planned to attend college there. Our pastor taught a college class at Hyles-Anderson on how to plant a New Testament church, driving up to Hammond every Tuesday morning. When Sumner made his accusations, we were outraged – not at Hyles, but at Sumner. We waited eagerly for Hyles to answer the charges. Sumner was public enemy number one.
Our church hosted an annual Preaching Conference, and Curtis Hutson and Jack Hyles always finished up the week. After the Sumner articles, Jack Hyles and Curtis Hutson met in my pastor’s office on Friday night of our conference to discuss the Sumner accusations. As I understand it, Hutson strongly urged Hyles to answer the charges as these accusations were damaging his reputation. Jack Hyles considered it beneath him to answer, but finally agreed to do so.
By the way, a letter has recently been discovered in which Curtis Hutson states plainly that he knew of Hyles’ immorality. This letter came out the year I was a student at Hyles, and yes, I had heard rumors of such a letter in circulation at that time.
My pastor rehearsed all of these things to me as a teenager. These were heady events in my little IFB world. We waited for several weeks until finally Hyles’ answer came. I remember standing in our church parking lot while my pastor read his answer out loud. This was one of the first answers – referenced in Sumner’s catalog of answers, but not available in any online form that I can locate.
I’ll never forget the sinking feeling in my heart as I realized that Hyles didn’t answer anything – that his answer was a bald-faced evasion. Hyles included his famous claim that as he wrote, he was sitting in his office, and that he could not see a door between his office and his secretary’s office. I’ll never forget it because my pastor, who had been in Jack Hyles’ office more than once, told me right then that there was a door. He was confused why Hyles would say that. He surmised then that either the door had been removed prior to Hyles’ response, or else a drape covered the door – such was my pastor’s familiarity with the wiley ways of Jack Hyles.
Am I an eyewitness to any of these things? I am not. But this was my world when I was a teenager, so I have been invested in this issue for many years. Does my answer count for anything? Watching Dave Hyles carry on his father’s legacy of evasion and sophistry is on my mind, and as a general rule, I write about whatever is on my mind. So, I’m going to take after this one. Dave refuted Linda first by discrediting her as a witness, then by insisting that there is no proof, and finally by vouching personally for the high character of his dad.
At this point, I’ll admit that I feel a little silly taking Dave Hyles seriously. This guy has left more garbage in his wake than an Indonesian tramp steamer. You could track him through an ocean by the dense trail of garbage still floating on the surface. Nonetheless, we’ll wade through the flotsam and jetsam and point out a few things that interested parties should note.
For what it’s worth, Dave Hyles makes it clear that he hasn’t watched Linda’s talk. I don’t find that surprising at all. In fact, it reminds me of Jack Hyles’s answer to Robert Sumner. When you listen to a Hyles, you have to keep in mind that they maintain a very loose connection to the truth. This seems to be a family trait, especially among the men. But, Linda didn’t do herself any favors in her TED talk. We’ll come to that in a minute.
I’m not sure how a guy who holds that you can’t believe anything unless you saw it with your own eyes can attempt to answer a video he claims he has never watched. But still, Dave answers. He spends the bulk of his time discrediting his sister by answering her exaggerated claims about her father’s wealth. I say Linda’s claims were obviously exaggerated. There were never 50,000 tithing members of First Baptist Church. Of course, Dave doesn’t exactly refute that claim either. Instead, he attacks the claim that Jack owned half of Hammond, demanding that she produce the title deeds and bank records that prove her claims.
Jack Hyles was a famous inflator of numbers, so Linda may have made an honest mistake thinking that FBC Hammond ever had 50,000 tithing members. The church did claim to have the world’s largest Sunday School, and boasts of membership in the vicinity of 50,000 wouldn’t be unusual coming from Hyles. But of course, “membership” was a pretty loose concept with Jack Hyles. I attended Hyles in its heyday. I defy Dave to prove they ever had anywhere close to 50,000 in attendance on any given Sunday. I didn’t do the counting, but I am thoroughly acquainted with their infamous “counting” techniques. But I notice that Dave doesn’t dispute the size of the church’s membership.
Dave disputes Linda’s claim that her father owned most of Hammond. He repeats the same rebuttal ad nauseum throughout the podcast – “prove it!” In response, I don’t mind admitting that I never saw this claim as central to Linda’s testimony. She was providing context to demonstrate the power her father held over people’s lives, especially her own. Her TED talk wasn’t really an attempt to prove the charges against her father, but rather a way of showing how she herself overcame the chaos of her youth. But still, she makes the claim. And while Jack himself didn’t “own” most of Hammond, the church did, and Jack owned the church. So, while Linda’s claim might not be technically accurate, neither is it without merit.
When I heard Linda’s TED talk. I saw this particular claim as fitting with the Hyles’ MO. As a student at Hyles, I will tell you that the college would have been better named Hype-Anderson. Hype was the substance of the college experience. Numbers were everything, and inflation was the name of the game. I attended college there the second year that Hyles held one of his “Pentecost Sundays,” in which they claimed to baptize over 5,000 people. I don’t believe that number is accurate at all. In fact, as an eyewitness, I didn’t see anything like that.
If a witness is to be discredited because of inflated numbers, I would have to say that nothing coming out of Hyles-Anderson in the 1980s and the decades that followed should ever be believed. And whatever credibility Linda might lack based on her exaggerations, her credibility still trounces anything that Dave Hyles might say. Honestly, I don’t believe Dave capable of speaking two true sentences in a row. I think the healthiest approach to anything Dave Hyles says is to believe the opposite.
Dave answers every claim Linda makes with a demand for proof. You should know that for Dave Hyles (and for David Baker as well), the only proof that qualifies is your own eyewitness. If you didn’t catch Dave Hyles in bed with teenage girls or with the dozen or more women in Garland, Texas, then you can’t know that it happened. If you didn’t see Dave do the things his first wife Paula claimed that he did, then you can’t know that it happened. If your retinas didn’t see the door in Jack Hyles’ office, or see the curtain that concealed it on Jennie’s side, then there is no door. If you didn’t catch Jack with Jennie, then there was no affair.
These guys reject Biblical rules of evidence – in particular the rule that says, “in the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established.” If Linda were the only one making the claim that her father had (at a minimum) a romantic/emotional affair with Jennie Nischik, then Dave might have a point. But the truth is, Jennie’s husband Vic, her daughter Judy, and Linda have all independently given their testimony and eyewitness accounts to the goings-on between Jack and Jennie. Dave’s first wife Paula has corroborated their witness (here are links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). UPDATE: Caleb Dugan sent me a longer version of the Paula Hyles interview. It can be accessed at https://youtu.be/h0Je_QJ-7wY?si=RbDTxI74QGQGwVw8. Voyle Glover and Vic Nischik have both written well-documented accounts. Their testimony is compelling, and they have not come back later and changed their testimony (Psalm 15:4). So, the case against Jack Hyles isn’t frivolous or circumstantial.
Most of Dave’s rebuttal centers on discrediting Linda’s claim that her father was fabulously wealthy, so I’ll offer an inconvenient truth in response. Because there is this court record – a deposition from Jennie Nischik’s divorce hearings – where Jack Hyles, under oath, describes the money he gave to Jennie, the $35,000 “loan” he gave her ($95,000 in today’s dollars), and the bedroom he built for her husband above the garage. Was Jack Hyles a millionaire like Linda claims? The exaggeration isn’t all that far-fetched.
Dave Hyles insists that his father was a man of the highest possible integrity. Let that sink in. Dave Hyles, the IFBs most famous gigolo. That’s hysterical. Dave Hyles vouching for his father’s integrity is like having Bernie Madoff audit your books.
I wouldn’t say that Dave Hyles refuted anything his sister said. If I am being charitable, I might say that he disputed what she said. But he offered nothing other than his own testimony on his father’s behalf – which has all the value of a dislocated foot or a broken tooth.
If you were thinking that Dave is in a better position to know, then maybe listen to DA Waite’s interview with Vic Nischik. Both Vic Nischik and Voyle Glover wrote books detailing their own knowledge of Jack Hyles and their investigations into his immorality. Neither of these books are available today, but plenty has been written about them. David Cloud has given a helpful summary of the information in these books. Or, read the voluminous back-and-forth between Robert L. Sumner and Jack Hyles. Or this website, which documents all the voices raised against Jack. You get a different picture from these sources.
Why write this? Because I know that some still insist on setting up a table and chairs and receiving their meals inside this dumpster. I have been shocked and disgusted over the years by the prominent voices in the IFB who quote Jack Hyles favorably, who promote his ministry, who hold him up as an example in their sermons. I hope I can persuade one or two more to move their chairs far enough away from the dumpster that the rotten aroma can’t reach you anymore. You’d be surprised how refreshing the atmosphere can be away from the Hyles burn barrel. Step away, and maybe you’ll see the Hyles ambiance for what it really is – the radioactive glow of a really toxic dungheap.
The Village Smithy 
All i remember about all of this , and what stood out the most to me, was when a Deacon of his church molested a little girl and was caught in the act. I think the losers name was Ballinger. Later others came forward too. Hyles told the parents of the little girl that Ballinger just loved little kids too much and told em they had no proof. I think the family sued and won and I think Ballinger went to jail. That tells me all I need to know about Hyles. It takes a brave man to speak out and write something so bold like this piece. Now I don’t say that to puff you up, I say it because it’s true. Swing that sword brother! God separates us from the tares and sometimes He uses us for the weeding!
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