Christmas Eve at Adam's House

By then his parents had moved back to Kansas City and divorced, and Hamilton had become the kind of kid he tries to reach these days. By seventh grade, he was getting drunk and taking drugs. One night when he was in ninth grade, he and a friend from Blue Valley High School stayed up all night "doing a lot of illegal things."

Around 11 the next morning, a man came to the door. Something was wrong with his throat; he held a microphone to it to talk, sounding like Darth Vader. The man invited the kids to church at Faith Chapel Assembly of God on 151st Street.

Hamilton and his friend laughed off the invitation. But later, Hamilton told his mother about it, and they decided to go. The three pretty girls sitting in the front row were enough to lure Hamilton back for a second Sunday. He stopped drinking and cussing and started reading the Bible and praying. By his junior year, Hamilton was president of his youth group, and people were telling him he ought to become a pastor.

He married LaVon Bandy, one of the girls in the front row, a week after high-school graduation in the spring of 1982. The couple moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Hamilton had a scholarship waiting for him at Oral Roberts University. But he figured out early on that he wasn't cut out to be a Pentecostal preacher. Oral Roberts was too structured, too black-and-white. "It seemed to me there was some gray in the world," Hamilton says.

Hamilton chose Methodism because he saw it as a thinking man's church. "It is OK if you have doubts. It's OK if you have questions," he says. "We don't have to check our brains at the door."

Hamilton went to graduate school at Southern Methodist University and returned to become associate pastor at Central United Methodist Church in Brookside.

In February 1990, he got a call from the United Methodist Church's regional superintendent, who offered the 25-year-old an opportunity he'd asked for. With $3,000 in seed money and a salary for at least the first couple of years, Hamilton would start a church near 135th and State Line Road, in what was then a construction zone for shake-shingled minimansions in Leawood South, Royce Estates and Hallbrook.

Within ten years, the superintendent told him, Hamilton should have 500 people showing up at church every Sunday. "I kind of gulped," Hamilton recalls.

At the time, Hamilton knew of only two Methodist churches that big -- Platte Woods in North Kansas City, and St. James United Methodist Church, led by Kansas City's charismatic soon-to-be-mayor, Emanuel Cleaver.

But Hamilton had a marketing plan.

He would target people who weren't active in any church. It would be a tough sell in the neighborhood. "People out here are educated, well-off," Hamilton says. "They have every reason to believe they don't need Christianity."

So Hamilton stole a page from companies selling BMWs and mutual funds.

Church of the Resurrection was built by telemarketers.

The summer after the superintendent's call, Hamilton set up a ten-line phone bank in the basement of Central United Methodist Church. Over six days, Hamilton and a team of volunteers from Central and Broadway United Methodist made 6,000 calls to numbers in the area around 135th and State Line. A volunteer asked whomever answered the phone if he or she went to church. If not, the volunteer asked whether he could mail information about Church of the Resurrection. About 600 people said yes.

About thirty families showed extra interest; the callers labeled them "hot prospects." Hamilton called them personally, offering to visit their homes. And he sent handwritten invitations to the first service, six weeks away, to be held at the McGilley funeral home's chapel at 123rd and State Line.

He also posted direct-mail letters to 10,000 addresses in the area. It was expensive, but Hamilton had done the math.

"Sending out ten thousand two- or three-color brochures cost approximately two thousand dollars," he writes in Leading Beyond the Walls. "We knew that if even three households joined the church as a result of the mailing, it would pay for itself in the first seven months."

The first service was on October 7, 1990, and just to make sure his pews wouldn't be empty, Hamilton had lined up 100 people from the Central and Broadway churches. That morning, though, 120 more people from the neighborhood turned out, almost all of them drawn by the phone call or the brochure.

His marketing strategy made certain they would hear from Hamilton again.

"From the time I began Church of the Resurrection, I believe my most important responsibilities were to (1) articulate a vision for the church, (2) preach the highest quality sermons I could preach, and (3) follow up on every first-time visitor within thirty-six hours of his or her visit to the church," he writes.

Everyone who went to the Church of the Resurrection had to sign in. To make sure of it, Hamilton stopped the service to let ushers hand out sign-in books. In the early days, Hamilton kept track of his flock on index cards; now they're in a computer file.