Sunday, October 11, 2026 · Independent editorial

At least 500 signers to Senate candidate Adam Hamilton: repent

“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,” Wichita pastor Kyle Lammott wrote to Rev. Adam Hamilton in an open letter that, according to Ian M. Giatti at the Christian Post on Saturday, October 10, had at least 500 signatures from church pastors and lay leaders as of Friday, and the man he wrote it to is not some stranger on a ballot but a United Methodist megachurch pastor running for the U.S. Senate in Kansas as a Democrat against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in a race the Christian Post says recent polling showed within the margin of error.

According to the Christian Post, Hamilton is the founding pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, which it calls the largest UMC congregation in the U.S., and he is a political newcomer trying to unseat Marshall in a seat the Christian Post says a Democrat has not held in nearly a century. Lammott, lead pastor of Exodus Church in Wichita, opened his letter this way: “I pastor a church in Wichita. We have never met, and I do not write these words lightly.” He went on: “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.”

The Christian Post reports the letter takes issue with a January 2022 sermon in which Hamilton said he does not fear that followers of other religions will spend eternity in Hell, and the letter answers that view bluntly: “A gospel that requires no preacher is not Paul’s gospel.” It continues, “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.” The Christian Post also reports Lammott called on Hamilton to repent of what Lammott described as teaching that Scripture contains errors, and that the letter 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.

“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, and the Christian Post reports he closed by saying he is praying for Hamilton and that his door is open for dialogue. That matters, because it reads as a rebuke from one minister to another, and whatever you make of it you should notice it ends with prayer and an open door rather than a slammed one.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Christian Post reports that former Kansas Gov. Mike Hayden endorsed Hamilton in an Oct. 2 op-ed in The Wichita Eagle, joining former Gov. Bill Graves, both Republicans, and it reports that Hamilton faced questions this week about how he handled reported sexual abuse by a volunteer at a church youth camp in 2005, a case Marshall is now featuring in a seven-figure ad buy. 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,” according to the Christian Post, and fairness means you hear his side of that in his own campaign’s words.

So here is the question for the Christian voter in Wichita or Topeka or Overland Park, and honestly for every Christian voter in every state with a candidate who quotes the Bible on the stump. Ask yourself whether you are voting for the résumé or the record, whether a collar or a pulpit buys a candidate a pass on what he has taught about the unborn and about marriage, and whether you would accept from a lawyer or a businessman the same positions you might be tempted to excuse in a pastor because he speaks your language on Sunday morning.

Scripture says teachers will be judged more strictly, and it says we are to test everything and hold fast to what is good, and it never once suggests that a man’s title settles the question of whether his teaching is sound. A Senate seat could mean votes on judges, on abortion law, on religious liberty and on the definition of the family for six years, and a voter who takes Christ seriously could reasonably decide that what a candidate has preached about the blood of the innocent is the best preview available of what he would do with that vote.

This is opinion and we will say it plainly as opinion. We do not know Adam Hamilton’s heart and neither does anyone who signed that letter, and the right response from Christians is the one Lammott modeled at the end of his letter, which is to pray for the man. But praying for a man and voting for a man are two different acts, and only one of them happens in a booth.

Christian first means what a candidate teaches about salvation, Scripture, marriage and the unborn is not a side issue you can wave off because he wears a clerical title. American second means the vote belongs to you and not to any denomination, campaign or former governor. Republican third means the GOP is not the point and no party gets a pass on life and family. Kansas votes on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and so does the rest of the country, so before you walk into that booth read what your candidates have actually taught and voted for, measure it against the Book, and then let your ballot say what you believe.

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