Why I Do Not Trust Adam Hamilton

Adam Hamilton won the Kansas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on August 4, and in November he will ask Kansans to send him to Washington on the strength of his character — thirty-six years a pastor, a bridge builder, a senator who "listens, tells the truth."

I do not live in Kansas and I have no vote in this race. I am writing anyway, because I watched what Hamilton did with the truth between 2019 and 2024. I do not believe a vote for Adam Hamilton is a vote for an honest man.

I have accused Adam Hamilton of gaslighting the people in the United Methodist Church, and I stand by the word. Gaslighting is convincing people that their accurate perception of what is happening is a delusion. But gaslighting has become cheap — it performs an accusation instead of making one — and a man who uses it owes evidence. Hold me to that.

This is not a brief on the dispute that split the denomination. Whichever side of it you take, I don't believe you should vote for him.

The charge is threefold: First, he was complicit with the bishops in injustice. Second, he spread information he knew was factually wrong. Third, he never once spoke up for the traditional Christians in his own denomination who were being wronged — not when Georgia froze their disaffiliation votes, not when African delegates were disenfranchised at General Conference, not when congregations were blocked and billed trying to exercise the exit the church had written into its own law.

Every fact below is documented, and two of the receipts are comments I left under Hamilton's own posts while it was happening — one on YouTube in 2022, one on Facebook in 2023. Where I draw a conclusion, I show the work.

Hamilton Insisting Nothing Was Changing

In 2019, after reaffirming its traditional standards, the United Methodist Church opened a limited exit, Paragraph 2553: congregations could leave with their property through December 31, 2023. For four years every congregation faced the same decision on the same clock, and Hamilton, pastor of the denomination's largest American church, was the most prominent voice in the country telling them to stay.

Through 2022 and 2023, as congregations voted, Rob Renfroe warned in a series of videos that staying would mean belonging to "a much more liberal United Methodist Church." Adam Hamilton answered with six Proud to Be UMC videos, pitched as help for congregations in their discernment. Hamilton said, somehow with a straight face, that the doctrine has not changed, the Articles of Religion still stand, and the Discipline still says what it says.

But play the videos back to back and watch what they do- it's honestly jarring. In the fourth, he tells viewers that Renfroe's warnings feel like "scare tactics." In the fifth, he tells the same audience the denomination is will do the very thing the traditionalists did not want. When Renfroe described the future, Hamilton called it fear. When Hamilton described the same future himself, he called it the plan. Renfroe was cast as a fear monger in one breath, and in the next Hamilton says the exact same thing and is cast as even-handed. I watched with my mouth gaped.

United Methodism's great communicator? The most successful Methodist pastor in the United States?

The reassurance came with numbers, too. Hamilton and numbers do not get along.

In that fifth video, in the fall of 2022, he said 10% to 30% of churches might leave, "probably closer to 15%". He also said that 80% would remain, maybe more. He predicted his own Great Plains conference would lose about 10%, mostly small churches. It takes a special kind of skill to stand that brazenly in the face of evidence.

He could hardly have been more wrong — so wrong that I believe he was openly dishonest. The three year period ended with 25% of the American denomination gone, and Great Plains losing more than double what he projected. Every estimate he gave, in every format, at every point, missed in the same direction.

And it wasn't as if he was just guessing poorly.

You didn't need a prophet — you only needed to read the annual conference session journals as they came out, recording what was being voted on. Every church was planning to exit was in those journals, and as clergy Hamilton was a voting member who voted on every disaffiliation in his own conference.

His numbers, from the beginning, forced the question on anyone paying attention: "What in the world is he doing? Is he a fool or a liar?" Those were the only legitimate options and more time has not helped.

Hamilton's discernment ran one direction too. Comments were disabled across the video series - never a good sign. The sixth video was the exception, probably because it was posted much later, and that is where I asked in 2022 why the rest of the discussion had been silenced. The question is still sitting there, bothering me as much now as it did then. A discernment resource with the replies turned off, and now I see it as being offered from the man now running for the Senate as the one who listens.

Conferences backed his videos with predictable muscle. North Georgia froze disaffiliation votes outright, blaming misinformation, and told its churches the pause would let them judge "the real, rather than the false or hypothetical, future" of the church — a future scheduled to arrive after the exit closed. Hamilton said nothing.

It took 185 congregations — more than a quarter of the conference — suing their own bishops and trustees and a county judge ruling that the conference had an affirmative duty to let them vote. Only then did 261 churches finally get out at a special session that November, weeks ahead of the deadline.

And North Georgia was only the loudest.

In Florida, more than a hundred churches went to court over added near-impossible insurance requirements and were dismissed on church-state grounds.

In Maryland, thirty-eight churches accused their conference of "holding their church buildings and property hostage." Some conferences rejected disaffiliation votes outright. Others set the added terms past what a small congregation could survive. Where was Hamilton?

The door shut on December 31, 2023, with more than 7,600 congregations out — a quarter of the American part of the denomination. Four months later the postponed General Conference met in Charlotte and did exactly what the worried churches saw coming.

The ordination standard came off May 1 on a consent calendar at 93%. The wedding prohibitions were removed May 3. The old incompatibility language fell with the revised Social Principles. In the same session the delegates deleted Paragraph 2553 by 516 to 203 and refused nearly thirty attempts to extend it. The church's court later outlawed the closure loophole.

Renfroe's "scare tactics" are now like the words of a prophet, happening almost exactly as he said they would. Hamilton's reassurances rang as hollow as they sounded to everyone paying attention.

Do you vote for a man who helps other perpetrate injustice?

The Old Switcheroo

The churches deliberating in 2022 were asking a trajectory question: is this denomination about to change in a way we are worried about? Hamilton and the bishops answered with a snapshot: nothing in our doctrine has changed. His answer was both useful and dishonest. A snapshot answer to a trajectory question is not information; it's a sedative.

Hamilton was answering questions nobody asked. He spent whole videos proving the United Methodist Church was not about to vote down the Trinity. No one was worried about that. No one was ever worried about a churchwide vote against the creeds. They were worries about a leadership immune to the most serious charges a church can face.

Ironically, Hamilton said in those videos if the denomination ever rejected the virgin birth he would personally lead his congregation out. He certainly didn't mind it when they were in charge of the church. Bishop Joseph Sprague published his rejection of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection two decades ago, complaints were filed, and the church dismissed them. Karen Oliveto, an active bishop at the time, wrote that we have made an idol of Jesus — a hard thing to do if Jesus is God.

The question was never whether the doctrine remained on paper. It was why denying that doctrine cost nothing for those the bishops favored. Hamilton ran defense against the strawman because the real one had no good answer, and refuting the strawman let him stamp the whole worry as "misinformation."

Thousands of church members were told that the pattern unfolding in plain sight — disaffiliation votes on public dockets, tallies climbing in everyone's feed — was a delusion. That is the definition of gaslighting, met in full.

What makes the old switcheroo question so scary. A true sentence about the present, deployed to quiet an accurate fear about the future, does the deceiving on its own — and it survives every fact-check on the way.

Deceiving people without needing to lie is not clumsy communication, especially for a man as gifted as Hamilton is regarded to be. It is craft. The numbers are where the craft ran out of true sentences, and he used the false ones anyway.

Do you vote for a man who meets direct questions with answers that miss the point entirely?

The Post From Hamilton That Broke Me

This is the part that angers me most: the numbers. The projections he ran through his videos was stale information already at the time of the videos.

But the Facebook post was out-and-out false information intentionally peddled as truth to congregations making the biggest decision in their history. This part I can date precisely, because I left a comment under it. Hamilton posted it during the most explosive week of the entire disaffiliation season.

On June 9, 2023, Hamilton posted a pie chart to Facebook titled UMC Disaffiliations. The chart egregiously estimated 84% of churches remaining, 3,933 disaffiliations approved as of May 31, and a sliver of 900 more estimated by December 31. Hamilton's text post estimated an American UMC of 24,000 to 26,000 churches and about four and a half million members.

I remember exactly where I was in my church when I read it and the rage I felt as I read.

The reason was because UM News's public tally had already passed 5,300 that very morning, and anyone with Google and two human eyes knew it would clear 5,800 within the week. The chart's ceiling for the whole season was about 4,800. The public count had blown past it before he hit "Post."

Again, I was left asking, "What in the world is he doing?" The real numbers were not hidden. They were on Facebook, news feeds, published in conference dockets. So, I put them in his comments, cited UM News, and asked where his data came from.

He never answered, but I searched and the answer to my question turned out to be very predictable: the bishops.

The chart was the conference's own material, a deliberately misleading institutional snapshot — in plain words, a lie. That the institution would grade its own homework generously surprised nobody. I expected that from them. That's why the disaffiliations were so large. What set me off was Hamilton putting his name on it, because his name supplied the one thing the bishops could not print on a slide: a reason for ordinary church members to believe it.

Hamilton had lost every ounce of respect I had left. At best, he reposted the institution's numbers unchecked — against a public count sitting in plain sight, while playing the denomination's chief corrector of misinformation.

His chart estimated 900 more churches would leave, which required ignoring a published calendar and more than twenty conferences scheduling special fall sessions for the sole purpose of ratifying more exits.

Time finished my argument for me. The denomination's own books: 5,595 disaffiliations in 2023 alone, more than 1,000 past Hamilton's complete estimatation, in one year.

There were over 7,600 churches, a quarter of the American part of the denomination, not 16% as he said in his videos. Count ordinary closures and the same data records 9,640 churches gone from a base of roughly 30,000, and the 2024 statistics put United States membership well below four million.

None of that even includes the 1.2 million that left from the Ivory Coast in one day. That was just the American church.

That is not optimism. He knew what he was doing.

Do you vote for a man who hands you bad numbers and calls the other side the fear-mongers?

Who Paid for the Reassurance

Congregations that believed him stayed past December 31, 2023, and when they looked up in May and found the forecast fulfilled, the door was gone — the General Conference refused every attempt to reopen it, and the church's court outlawed the workaround. The suspicious got out with their buildings, when they were allowed to. The trusting churches got locked in with a decision they were promised they would never face.

Alabama-West Florida shows how the trap worked. In 2023 the bishop and conference trustees proposed a plan telling churches they could wait: after General Conference 2024, an exit would remain open under the church-closure paragraph, on the same terms as the expiring one.

Churches took the deal and waited — while the same conference tightened its disaffiliation rules mid-stream, demanded a loyalty pledge from clergy, and derailed applications ahead of the deadline, forcing some churches to start over.

When the bishop was confronted at the 2023 annual conference with his own 2019 promise to help churches get where they wanted to be, he answered, "I can only deal with the cards that are handed to me."

Then the window closed, and the same cabinet and trustees asked the church's court whether the path they had promised was even legal. In October 2024 the court said no, the conference announced the path was gone effective immediately, and the churches that had waited on their bishop's word were told to comply.

By then the Alabama Supreme Court had dismissed the suit of forty-eight churches begging to leave, while other conferences had moved two hundred churches out through that very paragraph before the ruling landed. The ones who trusted Alabama-West Florida's promise got nothing but the trust clause read back to them.

And I will stay silent on what I consider to be one of the worst offenders: the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference's leadership, which was so evil and unrepentant that I resigned as a United Methodist.

But, the reassurance kept coming even after the votes. Bishops circulated letters promising that no pastor would be forced to perform a same-sex wedding - a promise not biding on future bishops. The promise was beside the point, because the objection was never personal conscription. It was belonging to a body that authorizes the thing.

And the promise cost nothing to make anyway — we live in America, where no pastor can be forced to perform any wedding.

Once again, a snapshot answer to a trajectory question. Then, a personal-exemption answer to a covenant question.

The congregations that believed him staked their buildings and their one clean exit on his word, and the exit is gone. Scripture has a word for weights that measure one way for the seller and another for the buyer, and it says the Lord detests them both. Hamilton risked nothing by being wrong.

Do you vote for a man whose word costs everyone but him?

The Bishops' Man

Put one question to every episode above: whose interest did it serve?

The counsel to stay served the institution. The counsel to wait for General Conference served the institution, since the exit expired first. The counsel to distrust the warnings served the institution. The posts about grossly inaccurate disaffiliation numbers served the institution.

Every congregation retained meant property still held under the UMC trust clause and apportionments still flowing, and every public intervention Hamilton made across four years pushed in that one direction. I have looked for the exception. There is none.

The six videos are the cleanest sample of how the complicity worked. They were made to persuade churches to stay, and in all of them the exodus has exactly one cause: Hamilton's strawman. Ask the churches that actually left, and the answer, over and over, was that they no longer trusted the bishops to uphold the church's own book — and that grievance, the engine of the whole thing, never appears once in Hamilton's videos. It is like the FAQ pages that websites write for themselves - they rarely the questions anyone actually asks.

When a viewer sent Hamilton names of bishops teaching outside the faith, he answered that one had retired eighteen years ago and that he would need to see evidence on the others. That evidence exists in active bishops' own published articles and sermons. I offered under his video to supply it anytime, and the offer stands.

When Renfroe quoted people, Hamilton wondered aloud about context and memory. Hamilton's skepticism flowed toward the critics and cover flowed toward the leadership, every time. I wrote under the sixth video in 2022 that just once I would like to hear him acknowledge the mistrust of the bishops' leadership that produced all of this. I am still waiting.

He was the bishops' darling going into the crisis and he is the bishops' darling coming out of it — the denomination's own Discipleship Ministries was handing him a leadership honor on the very day he won his primary this month.

No one in American Methodism had more standing to ask the bishops one hard question in public and survive the asking. The frozen votes, the punitive exit prices, the retention campaign built around his own videos — a single paragraph from Hamilton questioning any of it would have been news across the connection. That paragraph does not exist. In four years his voice and the institution's interest never once diverged, and a voice that never diverges from the power beside it is not a voice. It is an amplifier.

Do you vote for a man who runs defense constantly for people proven untrustworthy over and over?

Silent While Africa Was Locked Out of General Conference

The silence had its ugliest hour in Charlotte. This was the General Conference postponed from 2020 — pushed back again and again through the pandemic, with the organizing commission naming visa availability among its reasons for waiting and voicing the hope that 2024 would give delegates a better chance to get there. They had four extra years to prepare.

And still, roughly seventy-five African delegates — more than a quarter of Africa's elected delegation — never made it into the hall, largely because the invitation letters they needed for their visa interviews conveniently went out late from the General Conference's own office. The last of them arrived at the end of March, weeks before the gavel. Even the centrist Mainstream UMC caucus called out the delays beforehand. African groups asked that reserves already holding visas be seated in the absentees' places. The conference proceeded anyway.

On May 2, African delegates protested outside the convention center, a Nigerian bishop among them, and the president of the Council of Bishops answered that staff had made every effort. The margins were wide, and seating every absent African would very likely have changed no outcome. I am not arguing it would have. The wrong is prior to the arithmetic. More than a quarter of a continent's elected voice was locked out of the room while the room rewrote the rules.

Hamilton knew these delegates. In January 2024 he was in Dar es Salaam, meeting with United Methodist leaders from across Africa — most of them General Conference delegates — and moderating a panel of bishops.

In Charlotte, a member of his own Great Plains delegation, David Livingston, pressed the visa question on the floor repeatedly. Only seven of Nigeria's twenty-two delegates had gotten in.

The day after the sidewalk protest, Hamilton wrote his congregation a full report of the conference — the Social Principles, regionalization, the budget, the pension plan, even deacons and the sacraments — and called the gathering "joyous, largely united, and hope-filled." The locked-out quarter of a continent does not appear in it. Not a sentence, not a clause. When the excluded were African traditionalists instead of American institutions, the great corrector of the record had no correction to offer.

Do you vote for a man who goes silent exactly when the wronged need him loudest?

Not a Vote for an Honest Man

His critics are now playing games of their own — a super PAC ad has spliced sermon words into a sentence Hamilton never said, and an edited clip from 2022 is making the rounds. I want no part of it, and if you share this post, neither should you. The documented record is damning enough, and the moment we splice his sermons, we forfeit the entire argument.

The generous reading is that he believed his own reassurances — a man sincere and mistaken. It does not survive his position. Hamilton had the ear of the bishops, staff enough to stay informed, national exposure, and a microphone few pastors in America have ever held — and with all of that comes the responsibility of honest reporting.

The true count was public, and I put it under his own post myself. Maybe he never saw the comment. Nobody reads all their own comments. But a man with his resources does not get to be sincerely wrong about numbers anyone could check in an afternoon, and if he somehow was, then the denomination's most trusted voice never bothered to check before reassuring it. Neither reading leaves him honest.

The trajectory he waved off arrived on schedule. The people he corrected were right. Two years on, there is no audit, no apology, no honest sentence about the frozen votes, the churches blocked at the door, the promises pulled back after the deadline, the stale chart, the Africans locked out of the hall — nothing on the record that I can find. A man who has never audited the words he spent on his church now asks a state to trust him with the words of a nation.

Ask it plainly, one last time: do you vote for a dishonest man? Even with the benefit of the doubt, do you vote for a man who ignores the evidence in front of him? With more undue benefit, do you put a careless man in the Senate? Where do you draw the line?

So vote red or blue, Kansas — that part is yours. But do not walk out of the booth believing you voted for a man who listens and tells the truth. The listening was selective, the truth was rationed, and the people who trusted both paid the bill. His bridge carried the bishops' traffic for four years, and when the toll came due, it was not the bishops who paid it. I don't trust his leadership in the church, and it would be silly to trust him in Washington.

God bless, everyone. I don't post on politics ever. But Adam caught my attention.