At nation’s largest Methodist church, ex-employees split on Kansas pastor running for U.S. Senate

LEAWOOD — Former employees of megachurch pastor and U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton say he was a caring but demanding boss, and some scrutinize his response to the first report of child sex abuse at a church camp 21 years ago.

But even his critics describe him as a “brilliant” theological mind, “smart” and “charismatic.”

And they would rather vote for him than Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall.

“Not voting is not an option for me, and voting for Roger Marshall is definitely not an option for me,” said Sue Thompson, a longtime Hamilton assistant who left the church at the end of 2019.

Before facing Marshall, Hamilton would need to win the Democratic nomination in the Aug. 4 primary. He is considered the frontrunner among 11 Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate based on fundraising, polling and his status as the leader of the largest United Methodist church in the United States.

Kansas Reflector contacted more than a dozen former church employees and members, and interviewed four who agreed to be identified. Hamilton was inaccessible to some but transparent to others, they said. They shared conflicting views on his leadership.

Hamilton, the founding pastor of Church of the Resurrection, grew the church from its early days in an old funeral home in 1990 to a megachurch with an $81 million campus in Leawood and satellite locations across the Kansas City metro.

He announced his candidacy in April, and immediately became the prime target for both Democrats and Republicans in the race. State Sen. Patrick Schmidt, a Topeka Democrat who is also running for U.S. Senate, accused Hamilton in May of covering up child sex abuse that was reported at a church camp in both 2005 and 2006.

In an interview with Kansas Reflector, Hamilton acknowledged he would handle the first report of abuse differently today. But he defended the church’s internal investigation.

“I can just say that our aim was to make sure that if we got anything wrong, we wanted to get it right,” Hamilton said. “There was no attempt at a cover-up.”

Responding to abuse

Thompson started work at Resurrection in 1996, beginning part-time until she eventually was coordinating Hamilton’s professional and personal calendars as his assistant, working 50 and 60-hour weeks.

Her name is written on the bare concrete that has since been carpeted over in the main church, she said. She used to bake pumpkin and cream cheese bread for Hamilton around Thanksgiving, and they used to talk politics.

“People used to ask me, ‘Oh my gosh, what is it like working there?’ And I can honestly say, every day was an adventure,” she said. “(It) wasn’t always a good adventure, but it was an adventure.”

Thompson recalled the 2005 and 2006 incidents of child sex abuse, which involved a church volunteer, Scott Moore, who was accused of inappropriately touching adolescent boys in their sleeping bags while at a church camp. At the time, boys couldn’t positively identify Moore, according to later court documents.

She said Hamilton in 2005 met with the family of the boy who said that a man who turned out to be Moore groped him. Hamilton confirmed he met with the family but didn’t recall the specifics of their conversation.

Hamilton recruited two people, church employee Randy Meyer and volunteer Nancy Brown, to conduct an internal investigation into the allegations in 2005. Thompson said neither was qualified to lead that type of investigation.

Hamilton defended the investigators, but he said he “absolutely” would have handled the 2005 incident differently by going directly to law enforcement, which church leaders did in 2006. Brown, who died in 2020, said in 2013 court records in a case against Moore that she was trained by the Faith Trust Institute, which offers courses and consulting on handling and preventing child abuse. Brown went on to write the curriculum for the nationwide Safe Gatherings training for church volunteers and staff. Meyer, who could not be reached for comment, oversaw youth ministries at the time.

The internal investigation was inconclusive, citing a failure to identify a perpetrator, according to court documents.

Lee Jost served as director of student ministries at the church from 2001 to 2005 and, according to court transcripts, gave a sermon at the youth camp in 2005 discouraging the boys, without naming them, from discussing their concerns about someone entering their rooms and touching them.

He declined to answer questions from Kansas Reflector during a brief phone call.

“I will not have any comment other than what is already entered into the record,” Jost said.

He didn’t respond to a follow-up text message.

Moore was “a very, very popular” volunteer who acted as a mentor for many young boys in the church, Thompson said. Parents and kids loved him, she said.

Still, she said, “I was horrified the next year when they let him go back to camp.”

In 2006, Susan Bell, a former church employee, chaperoned the fall youth retreat that her middle school-age son was attending.

She said she remembered seeing Moore one evening pacing between camp cabins and a basketball court “like a caged animal.”

She said he looked scared.

Jost’s successor, Jason Gant, took over as director of student ministries in 2006, when Moore was accused again of entering boys’ cabins at night at the fall youth retreat and attempting to touch them. Gant said “the second we found out about the incident, we turned it over to authorities.”

He described Moore as “very gregarious,” “very involved” and “very energetic.” He was “very much loved” and “integral to the church,” he said.

“It would’ve been hard for anyone to believe he would’ve caused harm,” Gant said.

But he did, and Gant said it made him realize the best volunteers can share the same characteristics as those who are the greatest threats to children. He said Moore had a group of men who supported him and tried to defend their friend.

Gant said the church responded with: “We’re not going to have this conversation. We’re going to protect kids.”

Prosecutors in Linn County, where the youth camp took place, declined to pursue charges against Moore at the time, but Gant said their information helped build a later case. Moore was convicted in 2013 in Johnson County of a misdemeanor count of sexual battery for a separate incident, and he died in 2015, when he was found unconscious in a family member’s home hours after police found him half-naked in the back of a car with a teenage boy.

Michael Maroon, a Resurrection pastor from 2008 to 2011, said he had been abused as a child by a church leader.

“As someone … who’s been through something, I will tell you, I have full confidence that Adam would’ve handled that situation the way it needed to be handled. Not having been in the church at the time at that moment, I just know his heart for people,” he said. “I just have confidence that his heart would have been aiming for making sure that no one would ever be abused, and if anyone was, it would be as righted as it could be.”

Leadership views

Thompson, Hamilton’s former assistant, said Hamilton had high standards for employees. When he wanted something, she said, “he wanted it now,” and it was “his way or the highway,” she said.

She felt like she got to make a difference in the community, “and maybe the world.” But she also recalled the awful feeling of Hamilton chewing her out in the hallway in front of colleagues.

She said she was “sick to my stomach” when she found out he was running for U.S. Senate.

“All of this stuff then came bubbling up again, and it was like, is it the crowds, or does he need more adulation?” Thompson said.

She retired in 2019 and left the church at the same time because she said was unhappy with its leadership.

Gant, the former pastor who recently returned to work in his home state of Florida, said the organization tried to be upfront in the interviewing process about high expectations and the organization’s “high drive.”

“We were a very fast-paced culture in our staff, and I loved it,” he said.

He watched the church balloon from roughly 12,000 members when he arrived to today’s estimated 25,000.

Maroon, who left Resurrection in 2011 and now works as a financial adviser in Arizona, said the church was run with “a corporate structure in mind, and I think it had to be.”

He said “there was a strong drive for excellence” that could be at odds with pastors’ work-life balance. He had one day off per week and a pager attached to his hip that would go off at all hours.

“It was exhausting, but it was meaningful exhaustion,” he said.

He and Gant both viewed critiques of Hamilton’s accessibility and leadership as unfair.

“One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Resurrection, and that certainly started with Adam, is transparency in leadership,” Gant said.

Sometimes, he was transparent to a fault, he said. He would share things with the congregation before they were fully finalized, he said.

Bell saw it differently. She saw it as Hamilton launching ministries from the pulpit, catching staff off guard.

Between 1999 and 2020, Bell worked in a variety of roles, from the church cafe and bookstore to coordinating events, funerals and weddings, and she saw leadership as insular and adept at confining conflict. She said she stopped attending worship services before she took a voluntary buyout to leave the church’s employment.

“I think he has surrounded himself with people that want to ‘touch the robe,’ that want to be associated with him because he is successful. He wants to be around them because they’re successful people, and I think he’s changed,” Bell said.

Hamilton told Kansas Reflector he has followed a mantra: “Change, innovate, improve or die.”

“Here’s what I know over 36 years of leadership,” he said. “There will always be times where one employee doesn’t see things the way the other employee sees it, or something happens and their feelings were hurt by something that happens here.”

“We’ve tried,” he added. “I’ve tried to lead as best I can.”

Pace and expectations

Church of the Resurrection was certified in 2010 and 2014 as a “best Christian workplace” based on internal surveys from the nonprofit Best Christian Workplaces.

Kansas Reflector obtained copies of surveys from 2016 and 2018 that showed faltering employee satisfaction based on answers to questions about teamwork, conflict resolution, organizational transparency, communication and staff promotion and retention.

Best Christian Workplaces has conducted annual surveys since 2002 that measure employee satisfaction at Christian-led organizations, including churches and businesses. The surveys present more than 50 questions, each graded on a five-point scale. To be certified as a Best Christian Workplace, the organization must average four points per question.

Resurrection had fallen below that average since 2014.

While Bell and Thompson see the surveys as evidence of leadership problems at Resurrection, Hamilton said numbers have improved in recent years.

“Just the fact we did those surveys was a way of saying, ‘We want to figure out where we can do better,’ ” Hamilton said.

Cathy Bien, a spokesperson for the church, said survey scores are on the rise, though the church no longer uses Best Christian Workplace surveys. The most recent poll showed some of the highest scores in church history, she said. Kansas Reflector viewed a copy of results from 2023 to 2026 that show improvement, culminating in Resurrection ranking this year in the 95th percentile for employee satisfaction among similar organizations larger than 500 employees.

Bien, who has worked for Resurrection for 27 years, said ex-employees critical of Hamilton and the church are the exception, and their complaints can be attributed, in part, to the massive change the organization has undergone.

“For some of our long, longtime staff, that’s been hard,” she said, “to go from a staff meeting where you could sit around a table, now we have a gathering in our fellowship hall with 300 people.”

But she says Hamilton has maintained the church’s vision throughout that change.

Hamilton said the church sometimes experienced cycles of distrust.

“I’m proud of the fact that the church and our leadership team (are) constantly asking, ‘How can we do this better? What are the issues? What are people feeling, and how do we improve that?’ ”

The only flaw Gant said he ever saw in Hamilton was his pace. People felt like they couldn’t live up to it, he said.

“Sometimes I would say, ‘Adam you’ve got to rest,’ ” Gant said.

He said he has found that “disgruntled employees” have faulted Resurrection and Hamilton for two reasons: Frustration with an inability to access Hamilton following the church’s explosive growth and the high expectations placed on staff. Gant said if he still lived in Kansas, not only would he vote for Hamilton, he would probably campaign for him.

Maroon, who disclosed he has donated to Hamilton’s campaign, said it is impossible to show up for everyone at a church of Resurrection’s size. But in his view, Hamilton tried.

He said Hamilton showed up for his family when they endured miscarriages and when his father-in-law had a heart attack. Bell said Hamilton showed up at her front door when her sister died. Bien said he phoned her before taking the stage at a high-profile event when he heard her father died.

“He cares,” Maroon said. “And he’s not just a cerebral teaching pastor, but his origination of how he sought to understand the intersection of Christianity and humanity is because he has a deep understanding of the pain people have gone through because he has sat with them through their worst moments.”

He isn’t perfect, Maroon said.

“But you can give a lot of grace to people when you see them walking alongside people in the worst situations no one else would want to be in,” Maroon said.