Dr. Jack Hayford
Founding Pastor, The Church On The Way | Founder, The King’s University | Fifth President, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel
Biographical Overview
Jack Williams Hayford (June 25, 1934 – January 8, 2023) was an American Pentecostal minister, author, songwriter, and religious broadcaster widely known as “Pastor Jack.” He served as founding senior pastor of The Church On The Way in Van Nuys, California, from 1969 to 1999, growing it from a struggling eighteen-member congregation into one of the pioneering churches of the American megachurch movement. He later founded The King’s University (originally The King’s College and Seminary) and served as the fifth President of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel from 2004 to 2009.
Education & Formation
Hayford was raised in Oakland, California, and sensed a call to ministry at age sixteen. He earned his first bachelor’s degree from L.I.F.E. Bible College (now Life Pacific University) in 1956, and later completed a second bachelor’s degree from Azusa Pacific University in 1970 while serving as dean of students at his alma mater. He was awarded several honorary doctorates over his ministry career, including from Life Pacific College and Oral Roberts University.
Ministry & Professional History
Early in his career, Hayford served as National Youth Director of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel before joining the faculty, and later the deanship, of L.I.F.E. Bible College. In 1969, he was asked to pastor the First Foursquare Church of Van Nuys, then an aging congregation of eighteen members; under his thirty-year leadership it grew into The Church On The Way, at its peak numbering more than 10,000 members and becoming a widely cited model for the modern megachurch. From 1977 to 1982 he simultaneously served as fourth President of Life Pacific University. In 1997, Hayford founded The King’s College and Seminary in Los Angeles to train pastors, later renamed The King’s University; the school relocated to Southlake, Texas, in 2013 under the stewardship of Gateway Church, where Hayford served as Chancellor. He resigned as senior pastor of The Church On The Way in 1999 to focus on the college, and in 2004 was elected to a four-year term as President of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. The Church On The Way named him Pastor Emeritus in 2015.
Fields of Study & Expertise
Hayford’s teaching and writing spanned pastoral leadership, biblical worship, spiritual warfare and prayer, personal spiritual formation, and practical biblical exposition, and he was widely regarded within Pentecostal and Charismatic circles as a bridge-building elder statesman across denominational lines.
Publications & Media
Hayford authored more than fifty books, including Prayer Is Invading the Impossible, Rebuilding the Real You, The Beauty of Spiritual Language, Hayford’s Bible Handbook, and Kingdom Warfare: Prayer, Spiritual Warfare, and the Ministry of Angels. A prolific hymn writer with more than 600 hymns and choruses to his credit, he is best known as the writer and composer of the 1978 worship classic “Majesty,” one of the most widely sung contemporary hymns in the English-speaking church. He was inducted into the National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2014 and received a GMA Dove Award for his contribution to the album God With Us.
Recognition & Reach
Hayford was widely described within evangelical media as “a pastor’s pastor” and, in a 2005 Christianity Today feature marking fifty years of his ministry, as representing “the Pentecostal gold standard.” He received the Salvation Army’s William Booth Award and multiple honorary doctorates over the course of his ministry, and The Church On The Way’s growth under his leadership is frequently cited in studies of the American megachurch movement.
Personal
Hayford married his college sweetheart, Anna Marie Smith, on July 4, 1954; the couple had four children. Anna was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in early 2016 and died in 2017. Hayford married Valerie Lemire in 2018. He died at his home in Los Angeles on January 8, 2023, at age eighty-eight.