RAIDER said:
Each one of us on the HAC FFF has our own feelings and stories from our time at FBCH and HAC. I'm sure most of us can remember a time when we felt things were going great and we were behind the program. I believe we can all agree that somewhere along the way things started to slip. It may have been while we were at FBCH/HAC. It may have been after we were gone. Here is the question for the OP - At what time did you notice things starting to fall? Is there an event to which you can point? What year was it?
In 1981 as a young middle schooler, I went to Youth Conference and saw FBC for the first time. It was the last one conducted by Dave Hyles. That week the Lord planted the seed and that later led to me attending Hyles Anderson College.
I separate Jack Hyles from Jack Schaap. Though one followed the pastorate of the other the 2 were not the same. Brother Hyles was a Baptist and he held long practiced Baptist beliefs. Though these were not popular with other fundamentalists Bro. Hyles believed closed communion, the Doctrines of Grace, and that Jesus started the local church while He was here on earth, not on Pentecost. Bro. Hyles referred to "brethren of like faith and order." He rejected "alien baptism" and would not receive non-Baptist baptism onto the rolls of his church. Remember the Pastor's School when he preached about the church. He had just completed a long study about the church and preached it at Pastor's School. The folks there with BJU & TTU ties were fit to be tied. He also moved his belief regarding the King James Version of the Bible in the later years of his ministry. None of this I regard as a downfall.
If there was a decline in his ministry it happened because of 2 reasons.
1) Dave Hyles. When Bro. Dave sinned it brought shame and reproach upon both the Miller Road Baptist Church & the First Baptist Church. Bro. Hyles took the unpopular stance of reaching out to his fallen son and he attempted to restore him, and help him get right with God. For the way he did that he took much criticism and people used that to criticize. Many who had been wronged wanted to see Dave suffer, they still do. Whereas they wanted revenge, Bro. Hyles wanted to see restoration. I wonder who's right according to the scripture?
2) Robert L. Summer/Vic Nischick
When Sumner's article went national it was only to be expected that the reputation of Jack Hyles/Hyles Anderson College/Pastor's School would be damaged. The attendance of Pastor's School of 1990 was down. The auditorium looked full because HAC students were, for the first time, allowed to sit in the auditorium during morning sessions.
The amazing thing about that time was that, Jack Hyles did not resign, the church membership by and large supported their pastor both by attendance and tithes, and in the next several years, many more people were saved. Some say Bro. Hyles grew more prideful as he got older. I don't see that. btw, good men can disagree. Bro. Hyles preaching became more loving and pastoral in his later years, I think because of the Sumner article.
Jack Schaap was a totally different story. JS preached at that first youth conference I attended. I remember it because he made some statements that were just wrong and he made sexual references. I didn't think much about it then because he was such a small part of a long week.
As a student of HAC in the mid 80's I realized that the college was taking a strong stand for the KJV. In the spring of 1988 Bro. Hyles preached about the KJV both in church and in chapel. He used those messages as ways to set the tone for the direction regarding the KJV issue. Not long after that Jack Schaap was teaching Church Education class. He told the class of several hundred not to go to far off the deep end on this King James issue because there wasn't really that much difference between the versions and it really wasn't that big a deal. At the time I thought, "Hmm, he didn't get the memo." A few months later after summer break, Jack Schaap preached a stirring sermon about the KJV and it was obvious that he had gotten the memo. That right there should have been a tip off.
In the spring of 1989 HAC announced that they would be building a new dormitory. Mark Rasmussen and Jack Schaap announced that they would be taking an active role in raising money to build the building. In Church Education class Jack Schaap was talking about the matter and he made the joke that he could raise all the money needed by taking a group of college girls to the South Side and "being their pimp."
All these should have raised red flags.
The long answer is probably more along the lines of a gradual awakening to the importance of hermeneutics, and the dangers of pride combined with an ever-increasing concern for Schaap's contemporary direction. The last book of his I bought/read was the one about which direction we are going. I read it, said to myself, 'I ain't goin' in your direction, buddy' and threw it in the trash.
