Pastors urge Adam Hamilton to drop out of Senate race, 'repent' of teachings on homosexuality, abortion
A group of ministers has publicly called on Rev. Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist Church megachurch pastor running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in Kansas, to repent of key theological teachings and withdraw from the Senate race, even as he draws high-profile endorsements from former Republican governors.
Kyle Lammott, lead pastor of Exodus Church in Wichita, addressed Hamilton directly in an open letter that had at least 500 signatures as of Friday from various church pastors and lay leaders.
“I pastor a church in Wichita. We have never met, and I do not write these words lightly,” Lammott wrote. “I address you publicly on the matters below because you have taught them publicly, and because you are now asking Kansans, including the people of my congregation, to hand you their vote for a Senate seat.”
Hamilton, founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood — the largest UMC congregation in the U.S. — is a political newcomer challenging to unseat Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. A Democrat has not held the seat in nearly a century.
The letter takes issue with several of Hamilton’s public teachings. Among them is a January 2022 sermon in which Hamilton said he does not fear that followers of other religions will spend eternity in Hell. The letter argues that view undercuts the necessity of faith in Christ.
"A gospel that requires no preacher is not Paul’s gospel," the letter reads. "To say that men may be saved by Christ apart from faith in Christ, apart from bowing the knee to His Lordship, apart from believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth, is to deny the gospel outright."
Lammott also called on Hamilton to repent of what Lammott described as teaching that Scripture contains errors.
The letter also faults Hamilton for celebrating the UMC’s removal of language declaring homosexual practice incompatible with Christian teaching, and for supporting legal access to abortion while opposing recognition of equal rights from conception.
Lammott urged Hamilton to withdraw from the Senate race. As of Friday, recent polling showed the two candidates within the margin of error.
“Pastor Hamilton, I am asking you, as a baptized brother in Christ, to repent of what you have taught concerning salvation, Scripture, marriage, and the unborn,” Lammott wrote. “Then step out of this race rather than carry the name of Christ into an office you intend to use to mock God by shielding those who desire the blood of the innocent.”
He closed by saying he is praying for Hamilton and that his door is open for dialogue.
Exodus Church is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a global network of more than 160 churches and parishes. Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, founded the network in 1993.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has attended a CREC church plant in Washington, D.C., invited Wilson, a self-identified Christian nationalist, to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon in February.
Within days of the letter going online, Hamilton won the endorsement of a second former Republican governor of Kansas.
Former Gov. Mike Hayden, who served from 1987 to 1991, endorsed Hamilton in an Oct. 2 op-ed in The Wichita Eagle. He joins former Gov. Bill Graves, who wrote last month that Marshall had “turned his back” on Kansas voters.
Earlier this week, Hamilton faced questions about how he handled reported sexual abuse by a volunteer at a church youth camp two decades ago. Marshall is now featuring the case in a seven-figure ad buy.
The allegations — which resurfaced during Hamilton’s Democratic primary campaign — date to 2005, when a camp leader at the Church of the Resurrection reportedly molested two teenage boys at the camp.
Hamilton’s campaign has denounced the resurfaced allegations as a “desperate and shameful attack from a losing politician on his own state’s largest church,” a reference to Marshall.
