An Impostor for Pastor Jack : Religion: A radio caller tells of an out-of-body experience. But the minister of Church on the Way in Van Nuys assures his congregation that it wasn’t him.

No, that was not the Rev. Jack Hayford, pastor of Van Nuys’ conservative Church on the Way, telling a Los Angeles radio call-in show that he had had an out-of-body, near-death experience and was changing his stance on salvation.

Nor did he say that he had started an “out-of-body experience group” in his congregation.

After about 10 mostly skeptical inquiries to the church last week, Hayford told his 8,000-member congregation by videotaped message Sunday that someone had posed as him when telling a KFI talk show that once, while he was close to death, he saw and talked to a Christ-like figure who told him, “I am one of many.”

Station officials gave a tape of the Jan. 18 late-evening broadcast to the church and offered to air a correction. “We decided not to stir things up further by doing that,” said Rita Medall of Living Way Ministries, the broadcast arm of the church.

“Anybody who knows me wouldn’t have believed what the man was saying, even if they had heard about it secondhand,” Hayford said in an interview after returning this week from the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington.

“I do view it as a molehill, not a mountain,” he said.

Hayford even made light of the situation in his videotaped message to the congregation, referring tongue-in-cheek to “the great joy” of being misrepresented.

Nevertheless, Hayford aides notified several Los Angeles-area religious radio stations and Christian ministries of the incident as a precaution against rumors.

The impostor had identified himself as “Pastor Jack,” a frequently used appellation for Hayford, and had referred to the church by name, one of the largest Protestant congregations in Southern California.

Responding to radio program host Joel Roberts’ invitation to talk about visions purportedly recalled after brushes with death, the caller claimed his own experience had prompted him to start an “out-of-body experience group” at the Church on the Way.

The caller also said he was talking with Paul Crouch, head of the Orange County-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, about a program that would discuss out-of-body experiences “and not to look at it as New-Ageism.”

The impostor said he was taking his church and constituency on a different route. “Our faith can no longer tolerate the belief that people who do not profess Christ as their Messiah are going to hell. We are trying to change the tenets of our faith here in Van Nuys at Church on the Way,” the caller said.

“Well, as one of those people, I have to thank you for that,” responded Roberts, according to a tape of the broadcast.

David Hall, program director for KFI, said that Roberts has been filling in for regular talk-show hosts for only three months. But Hall said that neither he nor Roberts had enough background to know about the Church on the Way.

Hall said the volume of calls to the station precludes the possibility of guarding against impostors. People called “screeners” who initially take the calls at KFI concentrate on having callers focus their comments before going on the air, he said.

“Unless we have a man calling up and saying he’s Barbara Bush, we have no way of knowing whether people are who they say they are,” Hall said.