Raphael Warnock has done it. Adam Hamilton wants to follow as a pastor-US senator

If Kansas megachurch pastor and Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton manages to pull off an upset victory in his race for a U.S. Senate seat, he'd join a very small group. In the past 100 years, only incumbent Raphael Warnock of Georgia has accomplished what Hamilton aspires to do: serve in the Senate while continuing to lead his congregation.

Warnock has continued to preach regularly as senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since his election as Georgia's first Black senator in 2021.

Hamilton has made clear that if he wins, he would like to continue as senior pastor — preaching 12 to 18 times a year — at the Church of the Resurrection. With roughly 25,000 members in the Kansas City area, it's the nation's largest United Methodist church.

Warnock, in a video on U.S. Senate Democrats' Facebook page, discusses how he melds his political and pastoral careers.

"They are both about working for people even as you walk alongside them," he said. “I have always been engaged in a kind of ministry that takes you far beyond the sanctuary to the streets, far beyond preaching to the public square.”

Aside from Warnock, only a few other ordained ministers have been in the Senate in recent decades, but none who strived to simultaneously lead a church of their own.

John Danforth, who served from 1976 to 1995 as a Republican senator from Missouri, is an Episcopal priest who also worked as an attorney and diplomat. In 2004, he presided over Ronald Reagan's funeral at Washington National Cathedral.

Hamilton said in an interview that Danforth has been an inspiration and mentor for him.

“I talked to Jack before I got into this. I actually phoned him up and just said, ‘Hey, help me understand, how does this fit together?’” Hamilton said. “He and I share a lot about trying to bring people together, as opposed to dividing people, trying to lead from the center.”

Tim Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican, was a Baptist pastor before entering politics in 1985. After serving in the state legislature and the U.S. House, he served one term in the Senate from 1997 to 2003.

Still serving in the Senate is James Lankford, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who has represented Oklahoma in the chamber since 2015. Before entering politics, he was president of a Baptist-run conference center and youth camp.

Throughout U.S. history, it's been far more common to have still-active pastors serving in the House. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for example, served 13 terms representing the New York City neighborhood of Harlem while he was pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Other Black civil rights leaders who combined pastoring with congressional careers included Walter E. Fauntroy, who was Washington, D.C.'s delegate to the House, and William Gray, a pastor in Philadelphia before serving in the House from 1979 to 1991.

Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, who has represented Kansas City, Missouri, in the House since 2005, was pastor of St. James United Methodist Church from 1972 to 2009. His district, just across the Kansas-Missouri state line from Hamilton's home base, has been reconfigured by GOP state legislators to jeopardize his chances of reelection.

On the Republican side of the U.S. House, conservative white Baptist pastors who have served in recent decades include Mark Harris of North Carolina, Jody Hice of Georgia and Ron Lewis of Kentucky.

One of the most prominent clerics in Congress was a Catholic — Jesuit priest Robert Drinan. A Massachusetts Democrat, he served in the House from 1971 to 1981 before stepping down. He dropped his reelection bid in 1980 after Pope John Paul II said Catholic priests would no longer be allowed to hold political office.

Drinan was elected on a platform opposing the Vietnam War, and had moderate views on abortion and birth control that differed from official Catholic teaching. He was the first member of Congress to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment — not due to the Watergate scandal, but rather what Drinan viewed as the administration’s undeclared war against Cambodia.

There is no official count of all the clergy who ever served in Congress, but overwhelmingly they have been Protestants. Drinan is one of only two Catholic priests elected to Congress; no rabbi or imam has served there.

The first speaker of the House, Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, was a Lutheran minister. He served in Congress from 1789-1797.

The first African American to serve in Congress, the Rev. Hiram Rhodes Revels, was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was elected in 1870 by the Mississippi Legislature to fill a vacant Senate seat as a Republican.

This year, several members of the clergy from each major party have been nominated to run for the U.S. House. The Democrats include the Rev. Frederick Haynes III, a prominent Baptist pastor in Dallas, and two women currently serving in Iowa’s legislature — the Revs. Lindsay James, a Presbyterian chaplain, and Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor.

On the Republican side, at least three current or former pastors – all evangelicals – have been nominated: pastors John Elleson, running in a Democratic stronghold in Illinois; Mark Harris, seeking reelection in North Carolina; and former pastor Tim Walberg, seeking reelection in Michigan.

AP reporter John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

FILE - Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, D-N.Y., sits with Vietnam War protesters on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 1969. (AP Photo/Bob Daugherty, File)

FILE - Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., addresses the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 5, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - Former Massachusetts Rep. Father Robert Drinan holds a copy of the 1974 impeachment report of President Nixon while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Dec. 8, 1998. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - The Rev. Raphael Warnock delivers a sermon during a church service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Sunday Jan. 18, 2009. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)

PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — Jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial went home without a verdict Wednesday following a fifth day of deliberations and twice saying they can’t agree whether the Massachusetts mother is criminally responsible for killing her three young children.

The jury will return again Thursday morning. The judge told them to keep deliberating Wednesday when they said for a second straight day that they were at an impasse — a sign there’s a growing chance of a hung jury and the trial ending without a resolution.

Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, doesn’t deny strangling her three children in their home in 2023. But her attorney argues that postpartum psychosis led to her actions, while prosecutors say she knew what she was doing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

“I know it’s been a long day,” Judge William Sullivan said, “so at this point, what I’m going to do is, first off thank you for your time and commitment to this case. I’m going to ask you to come back tomorrow morning."

Clancy stared at the jury with no expression when Sullivan earlier in the day explained to the courtroom that the jurors were at a standstill.

Sullivan told the jurors not to abandon their own convictions just to reach a verdict, but urged them to seriously consider opposing views and reassess their positions if appropriate.

No one knows, he said, whether another jury would be “more intelligent, more impartial or more competent to decide it than you are.”

Clancy’s livestreamed trial has generated intense interest, with reporters and spectators packing the courtroom. The case has also sparked deep public divisions over her culpability and the issues around maternal mental health after childbirth.

Jurors have heard testimony from relatives and doctors about how Clancy’s mental health declined in the months before the killings and how her treatment included several medications and a short stay in a psychiatric hospital.

Medical experts hired by the prosecution and the defense reached sharply different conclusions about her psychiatric state when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy, ages 5, 3 and 8 months.

If jurors ultimately can’t agree on a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. Prosecutors would then have to decide whether to put Clancy on trial again, drop the charges or try to negotiate a plea deal with her lawyer.

If the jury decides Clancy was criminally responsible for her actions, it could convict her of either murder or manslaughter. If she is acquitted, a judge could still order her confined to a mental health facility if an evaluation determines that she poses a danger to the public.

After court ended Tuesday, Clancy’s attorney said it was a good sign that the jury kept working.

“The fact that they have not said that they’re done is very, very heartening,” Kevin Reddington said. “Obviously, they’re working very hard.”

Clancy strangled the children with exercise bands in their home’s basement, then jumped from a second-floor window. She remains paralyzed from the waist down. Her lawyers say she heard a voice telling her to kill the children so she could end her own life, and had bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness that can follow childbirth.

The prosecution argues she deliberately sent her then-husband on errands to get him out of the house that day, and prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of her suicide attempt. Patrick Clancy has said in interviews that he forgives his ex-wife, whom he views as ill rather than evil.

The jurors resumed deliberations Wednesday after the judge questioned them one by one following the arrest of a woman a day earlier who was accused of filming them as they left the courthouse.

The Massachusetts woman was arraigned on an intimidation charge Wednesday at the same courthouse in Plymouth, south of Boston. Surrounded by reporters while going to her car, she was asked why she had filmed outside the courthouse a day earlier.

“To see Lindsay. And I did see her. She was getting picked up by the van,” said Dawn Light, 56, of Sutton.

Light’s attorney, Jennifer White, called it a “misunderstanding” and said Light, a retired nurse, was only trying to take a photo of Clancy and “not interact with the jurors.”

Light described herself as a “crime junkie” and Clancy supporter, in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

A not-guilty plea was entered on her behalf and she was ordered to stay away from the court, the jurors and any witnesses.

Sullivan opened Wednesday’s proceedings with a warning to the courtroom about following his orders against filming, following, contacting, or tampering with jurors.

Clancy’s lawyer told The Associated Press that the judge called jurors up one by one to ask them if there was anything they saw that would affect their ability to be impartial.

This story has been updated to correct that Clancy’s attorney clarified that the judge asked jurors about their impartiality, not the woman’s arrest.

Associated Press writer Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed.

The press and spectators sit in the courtroom during Lindsay Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Lindsay Clancy and attorney Kevin Reddington watch as Judge William Sullivan tells the jury to keep discussing a possible verdict after jurors said for a second time they couldn't agree whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Mike Musgrove, father of Lindsay Clancy, center right, sits with family as they listen to the judge tell the jury to keep discussing a possible verdict after jurors said they couldn't agree for a second time whether Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Lindsay Clancy and attorney Kevin Reddington watch as Judge William Sullivan tells the jury to keep discussing a possible verdict after jurors said for a second time they couldn't agree whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger)

In this photo taken with a smartphone Dawn Light is questioned by reporters as she leaves her arraignment where she was charged with intimidation in connection with the Lindsay Clancy's murder trial in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

Dawn Light attends her arraignment on a charge of intimidation in connection with the Lindsay Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth District Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Judge William Sullivan speaks to the press and spectators in the courtroom during Lindsay Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

A diet soda sits in Lindsay Clancy's wheelchair as the jury resumes deliberations during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Lindsay Clancy reacts to news that a woman was arrested for recording images of the jury at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)

Lindsay Clancy looks to her lawyer Kevin Reddington as the jury keeps deliberating at her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)