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Church on the Way founder Jack Hayford is a quiet force among nation’s evangelicals
‘A pastor’s pastor’
VAN NUYS – Jack Hayford has heard the Lord’s voice many times.
The seminal moment in a 50-year Christian ministry – which includes founding one of the country’s largest churches, authoring some 50 books, composing 500 songs and rising to the presidency of his 5 million-member Pentecostal denomination – occurred in March 1969 at a Sherman Way stoplight.
Six weeks earlier, Hayford had become pastor of the 18-member First Foursquare Church of Van Nuys. As he sat at the Kester Street light, he refused to look to his left at First Baptist Van Nuys, then one of the nation’s biggest churches.
Suddenly, his left cheek began to sear as if someone were holding a blow-dryer to it.
“Lord, I know there is something I don’t feel that is right about this place,” Hayford said. “What should I do?”
“I want you to pray for what I am doing in that church,” God responded.
Hayford prayed and immediately was “flooded with a feeling of love” for the church, now Shepherd of the Hills in Porter Ranch. And for the next few weeks, he felt the same sense of love for every church he saw.
“God opened the door of my ministry to the larger body of Christ that day,” recalls Hayford, 72.
He recently was among three high-profile Christian leaders asked to mentor and restore Ted Haggard, the disgraced president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who resigned amid a gay sex and drugs scandal.
“Jack Hayford is a pastor’s pastor,” says the Rev. Tim Ralph, a member of the overseers’ board of Haggard’s former church, which selected Hayford. “He has an ability to take pastors who are burned out or frustrated or whatever, to take someone going through something as difficult as Ted Haggard’s situation, and deal with what needs to be done.”
You don’t know Jack
Although he transformed the tiny First Foursquare Church into The Church on the Way with 20,000 members, most people have never heard of Jack Hayford or the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Echo Park, where he’s served as president the past two years.
Hayford has appeared twice on the cover of the Pentecostal magazine Charisma. Last year, the cover of Christianity Today, the nation’s largest Christian magazine, bore his portrait and the headline, “Jack Hayford – The Pentecostal Gold Standard.”
But Hayford has remained a quiet force.
“T.D. Jakes can remember the time he was asked to speak at a conference. He was a nobody from West Virginia and suddenly he was T.D. Jakes, and he was bigger than life,” Stephen Strang, publisher of Charisma and Ministry Today magazines, says of the televangelist.
“Jack Hayford sort of resisted that. He didn’t want to be Billy Graham or Benny Hinn … He is just a monumental figure and people respond to him.”
Jack Williams Hayford was born June 25, 1934, in Los Angeles, grew up in the Bay Area and returned to L.A. in 1952 to attend what was then L.I.F.E. Bible College.
In 1969, during his fifth year as dean of students at L.I.F.E., Hayford was asked to pastor a struggling congregation in the San Fernando Valley.
First Foursquare in Van Nuys was one of the first churches to be planted after the denomination’s founding in 1923. But with 18 members and the massive First Baptist two blocks away, it didn’t seem the kind of place for a young minister to achieve international renown.
Hayford quickly began preparing for his next move. A prestigious Foursquare church wanted to hire him, and Hayford was a few weeks from giving notice when he again heard God’s voice: “Stay here.”
“And so we did,” he recalls.
On the Way
Church attendance exploded in the 1970s after, Hayford says, he was visited by the Shekhinah – Hebrew for God’s presence. By the early 1980s, Hayford’s popularity made The Church on the Way a pioneer of the megachurch movement that became common two decades later.
“Jack is always Jack,” says Bert Boeckmann, president of Galpin Motors in Van Nuys, who has attended Hayford’s church for more than 20 years. “He is totally consistent. He is one of those few persons who when you see him every day, he is always the same.
“It kind of reminds me of the Lord – the same every day.”
From Van Nuys, Hayford launched his ministry: the books, the songs, including the widely popular “Majesty,” The King’s College and Seminary and Living Way Ministries’ radio and TV programs. He also began the Jack W. Hayford Pastoral School of Nurture, a weeklong intensive course offered monthly to about 45 church leaders.
He’s proven himself unique at uniting Christian factions. During the late ’80s Hayford helped start LOVE L.A., a cadre of several hundred pastors who met annually to pray for the City of Angels.
“He is known throughout the world as one of the great ecumenical leaders,” says former U.S. Senate Chaplain Lloyd Ogilvie, who regularly communicates with Hayford and considers him a prayer partner.
Co-chairman of the Israel Christian Nexus, Hayford made regular trips to Israel during the Palestinian intifadas when other American tourists steered clear.
He’s visited 34 times – almost double that of his Jewish counterpart, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin of Stephen S. Wise Temple, who is 14 years his senior.
“I don’t think of myself as a Zionist,” Hayford says. “I believe in God’s sovereign providence and purpose with his ancient people.”
Hayford officially retired from The Church on the Way in 1999, but was called back for a year after Scott Bauer, his son-in-law and successor, died of a brain aneurysm in 2003.
Eleven months later, on Oct. 1, 2004, Hayford was again called upon. The Foursquare president had resigned after losing $15 million in a pyramid scheme, and the church needed someone to suture the wound.
“He is viewed as a voice of reason and calm at a time of scandal and crisis. They look to him as a source of balance,” says Thomson Mathew, dean of the graduate school of theology at Oral Roberts University.
Back in the black
The finances of the denomination, with 35,000 churches in 138 countries, are back in the black, and Hayford has turned his gaze upon the global church.
“He wants more than his denominational growth,” Mathew says. “He wants the message of the Gospel to penetrate the culture, not only in his country but across the world. He is a global Christian – a man with a vision for the world.”
As Hayford’s stature grew, more Christians began looking to him for guidance. One was Ted Haggard, a young Pentecostal pastor from Colorado Springs, Colo.
Give and take
In the mid-’80s, Hayford spoke at the dedication of New Life Church’s first building, and last year Haggard invited him to speak at a ceremony for another new building. In between, Haggard and Hayford co-wrote “Loving Your City into the Kingdom.”
“Unfortunately, we all discovered nobody was as close to Ted as they thought,” Hayford says. “We have not been close, but he has really trusted me as an influence. He has referred to me as a mentor, but that has not been because of a great deal of time spent together but to his observation of my life leadership.”
That’s all he wants to say.
The restoration team – Hayford, the Rev. Tommy Barnett of Phoenix First Assembly of God and H.B. London Jr. of Focus on the Family – have agreed not to speak publicly about the disgraced minister.
“Potentially,” Hayford says, “we’re all pretty bad. By the grace of God, we can become great. Without, we can become great too – just great sinners.”
Those who have worked with Hayford say he can guide Haggard beyond his sin to redemption and restoration.
“In this situation,” says Ralph of the New Life overseers’ board, “Jack has been very compassionate in dealing with Ted’s family and the church in Colorado Springs, while also being bold and rolling up his sleeves and doing the surgical stuff, saying, `Hey, we’re going to get the real nasty stuff out of here.”‘
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