Jim Hays

Conway pastor first served people as a U.S. marshal

Former U.S. Marshal Jim Hays retired in December 1991 and is currently pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Conway.  Hays enrolled in the Arkansas Presbytery’s Lay Pastor Academy in 2009 when he was thinking of retiring from the U.S. Marshals Service.
Former U.S. Marshal Jim Hays retired in December 1991 and is currently pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Conway. Hays enrolled in the Arkansas Presbytery’s Lay Pastor Academy in 2009 when he was thinking of retiring from the U.S. Marshals Service.

Jim Hays said his life changed when he was a junior at Central High School in Little Rock. He was working at Casa Bonita and thinking about becoming a meteorologist.

One afternoon, his dad told Hays that the office of the Eastern District of Arkansas of the U.S. Marshals Service was in need of a “go-fer.” His dad thought the job would suit Hays.

Hays got the job, which consisted of getting coffee, delivering paperwork and performing other mundane tasks. That was April 29, 1977; he was 16.

He liked what he saw; meteorology went out the window.

After high school graduation, Hays enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to obtain a criminal-justice degree. His sophomore year, he switched to night school and went to work full time. After completing his degree, he went to the United States Marshals Service Basic Training Academy in Brunswick, Georgia.

Although Hays at first didn’t think of his profession as a calling, he came to that understanding upon reading The Calling of Dan Matthew, by Harold Bell Wright. In that book, Hays found a quote that has stayed with him: “I have always been taught … that every man is divinely called to his work, if that work is for the good of all men. His faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the call is revealed in the motives that prompt him to choose his field.”

“I started thinking, ‘What good am I doing?’” Hays said. He had arrested a couple of thousand people throughout his career, and many of them had thanked him for saving their lives. Without intervention, they might have died of drug addiction or been killed on the street.

“I realized that many of these people would have liked to have been better people, but due to circumstances, they didn’t know how,” he said.

Although he still had to comply with the strictures of his job, his attitude subtly shifted.

“I began to treat [prisoners] with more respect because I was hearing that they didn’t want to be where they were. Things were beyond their control.”

About 5 percent of criminal-justice work occurs before the arrest, Hays said. The other 95 percent happens afterward. The majority of a marshal’s job consists of moving prisoners here or there — to a new jail or to trial and back.

And Hays saw the same prisoners over and over.

Prisoners couldn’t take their possessions with them when they moved, and a Bible was one possession often left behind.

“I ended up with dozens and dozens of Bibles,” Hays said. He gave them to other prisoners who wanted them.

The beginning weeks of Hays’ career were frightening, he said.

While he was still at the academy, a parole violator in Dallas, Texas, shot and killed a police officer who was trying to arrest him.

Shortly after Hays’ graduation, Gordon Kahl, a member of Posse Comitatus, killed two marshals in a North Dakota shootout and fled to Smithville, Arkansas, where he killed a sheriff before being killed himself. When the “officer down” call came, Hays and the Eastern District’s chief marshal rushed to the scene, too late to get in on the shooting, which was all right with Hays.

Six weeks later, four people were killed in still another shootout.

“I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’” Hays said. “Then things settled down; everything became routine.”

Hays said he never fired his gun in the line of duty.

“Routine,” as Hays describes it, means serving warrants, working trials and moving prisoners.

In the 1980s, marshals served as federal court bailiffs.

During his first bailiff’s job, Hays got crossways with the judge, he said. She called a 15-minute recess, so he

sequestered the jury and, after 15 minutes, went to her chambers to see if he should bring the jury back. She upbraided him for not having already done so. So at the next recess, he returned the jury to the courtroom before going for the judge. This time, she scolded him for moving the jury first because “we have business that the jury shouldn’t hear,” she said.

“I thought I was done for,” he said with a grimace.

Early in his career, Hays spent 13 weeks in San Diego helping a local police officer serve warrants.

“We had a blast,” Hays said. “We’d work six days a week serving warrants, and on Sunday, we’d have a barbecue.”

The benefit of this federal-local partnership is that the local officer can be deputized as a marshal, which allows jurisdictional lines to be crossed, when necessary, to serve a warrant. The Marshals Service is good about delegating marshals to help other agencies, Hays said.

Another time, Hays and several other agents were sent to Australia to extradite seven fraudulent Aussie truck drivers. Although it was an assignment, Hays was able to do some sightseeing in Melbourne.

Other things that Hays calls “routine” are that he worked the John Gotti and Marion Berry trials and the Timothy McVeigh trial and execution — a mob boss, a mayor and a bomber.

The Marshals Service encourages fitness and participates in the International Law Enforcement-Police Olympics each year. One year, in Vancouver, Canada, Hays represented his district in the 10K walk-run and earned a silver medal.

“A guy from India beat me; he could fly,” Hays said. “He left the start line, and I never saw him again.”

Hays retired from the Marshals Service in 2011, thinking he would travel, play golf and generally take it easy, but it wasn’t to be.

He considers his present job, pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church of Conway, a calling as well. He didn’t anticipate it, although someone did.

When he professed his faith in the fourth grade, an old lady in the Baptist church he attended said the Lord must have something important planned for him because he had given his life to Christ at such a young age.

When he and his wife, Beth, married in September 1983, Hays joined her home church, Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock. They moved to Conway in 1993 so their daughters, Laura and Sarah, could be in a better school system, and they joined First Presbyterian Church. Hays became active, teaching an adult Bible class, serving two terms on the Session, giving children’s sermons during worship and teaching the confirmation class.

Hays brought from his Baptist upbringing a deep love of the Bible, in which he had been thoroughly immersed with Bible drills and memorization.

He built on that at FPC, especially in his work with the teens in the confirmation class. He loved that class because of “how much I was learning; I was being fed by the understanding I was getting,” he said, adding that the teens were “starting to question; they found more meaning in their relationship with God.”

“That was more rewarding for me than [it was] for any of the students,” he said.

About that time, the Arkansas Presbytery began the Lay Pastor Academy, a program to train laymen to serve churches temporarily lacking an ordained minister. Several of Hays’ friends urged him to enroll in the academy.

Since he was beginning to think about retirement, Hays thought this wasn’t a bad idea. He could play golf, have more time for jogging and preach an occasional sermon when the regular minister was ill or on vacation.

He enrolled in 2009 and loved every minute of the academy. The instructors were excellent, offering in-depth Bible study, as well as instruction in church polity and organization.

“I was just absorbing it,” he said.

About halfway through the academy, his dream of occasional sermons was derailed.

While attending a function at the home of an executive of the Arkansas Presbytery, he overheard a piece of conversation between his host and the executive presbyter: “What about Jim?”

Hays’ ears perked up.

It seems that the minister serving Memorial Presbyterian Church in Atkins had died unexpectedly a week or so before, and a replacement was needed as soon as possible. Hays hadn’t completed his training and wasn’t yet authorized to administer the sacraments. But he preached his first sermon at Atkins in December 2010 and was commissioned to that church as its full-time minister on Feb. 1, 2011, 10 months before his retirement from the U.S. Marshals Service.

He served the Atkins church until June 2014, when a controversy that had been building in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) came to a head.

“I left Atkins in July 2014 over some theological interpretations of Scripture and the authority of Jesus Christ within the denomination, and not because of Atkins,” Hays said. He felt he couldn’t in good conscience be an effective leader when he no longer shared the denomination’s beliefs.

He returned to First Presbyterian Church in Conway and sat in a pew with his family for the first time in more than three years, which Beth loved. But the denominational shift had affected FPC as well, and about three dozen of its members decided to leave the denomination — although it meant leaving a congregation they loved — and go elsewhere. They weren’t sure where.

They began worshipping at Four Winds Chapel in Conway in September 2014, with Hays as their worship leader, and at an October luncheon meeting, they voted to stay together rather than to disperse to separate congregations. Hays agreed to serve as their pastor.

A discernment process eventually led them to apply to and be accepted in February 2015 by the Evangelical Order of Presbyterians, a new denomination. And on Dec. 21, 2014, the congregation of Grace Presbyterian Church of Conway held its first worship service at 1010 Hogan Lane.

When people say, “I’d like you to meet my pastor,” Hays said, he looks around to see who they’re talking about, but he is willing to serve as long as God and the congregation want him.

He was called, after all.

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