On the outskirts of Shawnee, Oklahoma, along a tree-lined but sparse road in Pottawatomie County, sits Hilltop Baptist Church. In the church’s stone building, as a visitor in a congregation of seven people, is where Todd Pylant (‘93), pastor of First Baptist Church of Benbrook, Texas, heard the Lord calling him to ministry.

Pylant was in the middle of his freshman year at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but he was “pretty miserable,” he recalls. Thinking he had selected the wrong college following graduation from L.D. Bell High School in Hurst, Texas, where he had grown up since he was five years old, Pylant set out to find a different institution for his undergraduate education.