Ex-TCU football player who worked at Gateway church has a lot to say about Robert Morris
When Kam Hunt’s son was born the person who held him before he did was Robert Morris.
Hunt has known Morris for more than 20 years, and during that time he became a father figure to the former TCU football player. Hunt had worked at Gateway Church as a youth pastor, and today he’s not sure where Morris is.
Morris is the disgraced ex-leader of Gateway Church in Southlake who resigned June 18 after revelations he molested a girl in the 1980s.
“I love that man. I have prayed for him. I have cried about him in my car. I wish I could talk to him. He is MIA and I have been worried about him,” Hunt said in a phone interview.
Make no mistake, Hunt is also mad at Morris. Hurt.
Hunt is still a member at Gateway, where his wife is a pastor. They have no intention to leave Gateway, but Kam speaks for a lot of people who attend churches that lose sight of their intention, led by men who forget they’re but a messenger.
“I am still hurting. I’m mad at myself for falling for it,” Hunt said. “It’s tough. You feel deceived, and this isn’t just Gateway. The leaders of the church preach a message of that old adage of, ‘Do what I say and not what I do.’
“You told me how to perform and how to operate, you chastise me and what happened to you? I love the men that run that church. I love them like fathers. I am mad at the fathers, I am still their son.”
Hunt played at TCU from 1997 to 2000, when he earned his degree. He accepted a job at Gateway in 2004 to serve as a pastor for junior high-aged kids. He stayed there until 2018, when he left to start a practice in marriage and family counseling. He and his wife reside in Keller with their two kids.
Like nearly everyone else at Gateway, Hunt had no clue about the specifics of Morris’ past. Like nearly everyone else at Gateway, Hunt felt sick when he learned of those specifics. Those specifics include Morris abusing a girl from the time when she was 12 to 16, back in the 1980s. Morris was in his 20s at the time, when the father of the victim discovered the crime.
Morris left the ministry for two years before returning; he said he returned with the “blessing” of his victim’s father, and the leaders of the church.
Morris founded Gateway in 2000, and it grew into a big part of Southlake and DFW. Hunt and his family were a part of that growth spurt. He lived all of it before he left because of “burnout.”
Hunt says one of the reasons Gateway grew as rapidly as it did was a result of two churches in the area that collapsed amid allegations against their leadership.
“Gateway took the credit and I’m thinking, ‘Let’s be honest,’” Hunt said. “We had a marketing department. That’s part of the problem. There is a marketing department. In order to have a good business you need marketing, and part of the issue is business. When you have business, other practices get entered into the business of church. I am not anti-marketing, but God is not business.”
Hunt said when he was a youth pastor at Gateway he was never told he had to hit a specific number in terms of attendees at his classes or events. There was no quota.
At some point, and he’s not sure when, it became about numbers.
“In their defense, they never said it to me but I felt like it was,” he said. “It forced me to change, and I was a dancing bear. I felt like I had to fill seats. I would do anything — a mechanical bull in the parking lot. We had an influencer come. Get someone to swing from the rafters. We are not supposed to do that; we lifted our brand before Jesus.”
To Hunt, that was the core issue. Everything else was placed before their core mission, Jesus Christ and God.
Gateway’s trajectory sounds like the small business that morphed into a national brand and chain. Unintentionally, priorities change, and those in charge lose sight of their intention.
But Gateway is a church, not Facebook.
“Pastors are not meant to be celebrities. They are not meant to be on the throne that God is supposed to be on,” Hunt said. “If you are a Christian, the celebrity is Jesus Christ. Your celebrity is not the person talking about the person you should be worshipping. Don’t worship the middle man.”
Hunt believes Gateway will not close. He also said the attendance at the services over the previous weekend were undeniably down. He estimates the figure was down by a half.
He and his wife have no intention of leaving.
“The testament of faith and Christianity is that we keep going; that would signal to other people on the fray that this church is going,” he said. “Leadership needs a complete overhaul, of course. Let’s not repeat the sins of the past, and part of the sins of the past includes we put a person in God’s place.”
Hunt is a pragmatist. He could not have seen this coming, but he was smart enough to know something was.
“When I talk to kids I tell them all the time, ‘Choose your trauma, because it’s coming,’” he said. “Everywhere you go something is going to fail because man is behind it.”
The man who failed Kam Hunt, and so many others, is gone from the church he founded.
Kam Hunt would like to talk to Robert Morris, “son to father.” Because the son has a lot to say.
This story was originally published July 30, 2024 at 2:39 PM.
