Dear Pastor Hamilton,
I pastor a church in Wichita. We have never met, and I do not write these words lightly. 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.
I do not write only for myself. There are other ministers in Kansas who hold these same convictions. Pastors and leaders who have weighed these issues according to Scripture and arrived where I have arrived are welcome to stand here with me by signing below.
Pastor Hamilton, I am asking you, as a baptized brother in Christ, to repent of what you have taught and to withdraw from the Senate race. My reasons come from Scripture. They are the foundation upon which I stand and the authority by which I speak, and I intend to speak to these matters as plainly as you have spoken from your own pulpit.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation. I am not ashamed of the gospel. In January 2022 you preached a sermon titled “Is the Bible True? Is Jesus the Only Way?” You told your people you do not fear that followers of other religions will spend eternity in hell, and that when they arrive in heaven they will recognize Jesus as the one they had been seeking all along. Your campaign says this is inclusivism and not universalism. Fine. I take you at your word that you believe salvation comes through Christ alone. But Paul does not stop where you stop. He binds salvation to faith, and faith to hearing: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). A gospel that requires no preacher is not Paul’s gospel. 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.
You have taught for years that Holy Scripture contains errors. In your sermon on Mary Magdalene you set Paul against Jesus, as though we were free to choose which of them to follow. Jesus left us no such freedom. “He who hears you hears me” (Luke 10:16). Peter placed Paul’s letters among “the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). Everything we know of Jesus comes to us through His apostles. When a pastor teaches his people to separate the Jesus parts of the Bible from the Paul parts, he has handed them authority over the Word of God, and they will not return it.
You announced to the press that the Book of Discipline’s language calling homosexual practice incompatible with Christian teaching would be removed, and you celebrated when it was. This is no argument over one difficult verse. God gave us marriage as a picture of Christ and His bride, and Paul says so outright: “This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). Bless a union God calls sin, name it marriage, and you have made a mockery of the one thing on earth given to show what the love of Christ for His church looks like. You have also broken with every branch of the church for two thousand years, Wesley among them. I know you want people to hear that they are welcome and loved. So do I. But hear what Paul told the Corinthians: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). That is the welcome. Come and be washed. You have kept the welcome and dropped the washing, and the people it costs most are the very ones you mean to help.
I would ask you to repent of these things even if you were not running for office. What follows is why I am also asking you to withdraw from the Senate race.
Your campaign says you support safe and legal access to abortion, and you have come out against the amendment that would recognize equal rights from conception. You describe this as a moral tension. I see no tension. Scripture counts “hands that shed innocent blood” among the things the Lord hates (Prov. 6:17). David says God knit him together in his mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). When Mary carried the Lord into Elizabeth’s house, the unborn John leaped for joy (Luke 1:41–44). Our Lord spent nine months in a womb Himself. When a minister of that Lord defends the murder of children before birth, he mocks the way Christ chose to come to us. The church has never wavered here. The Didache, written not long after the apostles, says flatly, “You shall not murder a child by abortion,” and the fathers who took up the question said the same. What you call a tension is a break with the whole church, and a defense of the very thing for which Israel was condemned, the blood of her children (Ps. 106:37–38).
The Senate is not neutral ground. Paul calls the civil ruler “God’s servant for your good,” the one who “does not bear the sword in vain” (Rom. 13:4). The sword is given to guard the innocent. You are asking for it while promising in advance to keep it sheathed over the unborn. You would take an office you have already said you will not use for the purpose God gave it.
Nor is your faith a private matter in this race. Most Kansans know your name because you are a pastor, and much of the trust they give you is trust in that calling. James says “we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness” (Jas. 3:1), and it applies here. You have told your own congregation that men may be saved without hearing of Christ, that Paul may be set aside when he is inconvenient, and you have blessed what God has called sin. A man who teaches such things cannot be trusted to lead. If you will not keep faith with the Word you were ordained to preach, why should Kansas expect you to keep faith with her?
So, as one minister to another and not as a political opponent, I am asking you to repent. Repent of what you have taught concerning salvation, Scripture, marriage, and the unborn. 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. Elijah stood on Carmel and asked Israel, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him” (1 Kings 18:21). That is my question to you.
To the ministers and leaders reading this letter alongside Pastor Hamilton: the names below belong to those who have examined these things in the Scriptures and judged them as I have. A shepherd is not at liberty to keep silent while another shepherd leads the sheep somewhere Scripture forbids.
Pastor Hamilton, I know what this would cost you. Repentance always costs something, and it costs more the more people are watching. But the promise holds for pastors as for anyone else: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). I am praying for you. My door is open.
In Christ, Kyle Lammott Lead Pastor, Exodus Church · Wichita, Kansas