mike hillebrecht
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mike hillebrecht
Two Sides of the Same Coin
by
Most of us were handed a smaller version. A God whose warmth had to be maintained. Whose nearness was earned. Whose love waited to see if your performance was sufficient before it fully applied to you.
That version of God required constant management. And the exhaustion that came from it was real — because the system that produced it was real.
It just wasn't describing the God who spoke from Sinai.
Something was announced on a mountain before any of the systems existed.
Before the creeds, the councils, the membership classes, and the theological language that sorted you into the right kind of believer — God descended to a cleft in the rock and spoke his own name. Not his requirements. His character. Abounding in steadfast love.
That word — chesed — is what English translations have never quite been able to carry. Every rendering catches something. None catches everything. And most of us have been living inside the smaller version for years, quietly building a theology around a God whose love felt conditional, whose nearness had to be maintained, whose grace waited behind a payment window to see if your deposit was sufficient.
It wasn't. And the toll booth was always empty.
Chesed and Charis traces a single unbroken thread from Sinai to the letters of Paul — from the Hebrew word God used to introduce himself to the Greek word Paul placed at the opening of every letter he ever wrote, before correction, before instruction, before anything else. Two languages. Several centuries apart. One character. One announcement.
The love was never the reward for the arrangement. It was always the ground beneath it.
This book is for anyone who has felt the gap between the grace that was proclaimed and the shame that was administered. For anyone who has performed faithfully inside a system that claimed to mediate what was never behind a gate. For anyone who has gone quiet inside a faith that was supposed to make them free.
The distance you felt was real as an experience. It was never real as a fact.
If your beliefs today are the same as they were last year, five years ago, or even ten years ago, you are not growing spiritually.
Where Grace Is Not a Doctrine — It’s a Discovery — You Were Never Who They Said You Were. Somewhere along the way, you were handed a story about yourself. Maybe it came from a pulpit. Maybe from a parent. Maybe from the relentless inner voice that counts your failures before you’ve finished your morning coffee. The story goes like this: You are broken. You need fixing. If you try hard enough, believe correctly enough, confess thoroughly enough — maybe then, you’ll be acceptable. Mike Hillebrecht has spent decades dismantling that story. Not with cleverness. Not with theological gymnastics. But with the one thing that story cannot survive: The truth that grace was never about fixing you — because you were never as broken as they said.
The RV, Grandkids, or a Pew
Nobody in this book gets fixed. Everybody gets a little more room to breathe.
Smuggling God Back Into Their Lives
The Joyful Heretic is a novel about the truths we tell the grieving, the smaller God we hand them when we're afraid, and what it costs — to a woman, to a town, to a faith — when someone finally decides to tell it larger.
A Lesson Before explores the provocative idea that grace preceded creation itself. Blending Scripture, theology, and contemplative insight, it challenges readers to move beyond performance-based faith and awaken to a deeper reality: that God's acceptance, presence, and love may have been established long before humanity ever knew it was needed.
Leon Scheffield has been delivering the same sermon for twelve years. He walks into dying churches, says the thing the pastor can't say, and leaves them changed. He has a list of churches that called him and a shorter list of the ones he actually went to. He knows how to read a room from a single phone call.
Then a letter arrives from a woman he's never met.
Marguerite Fontaine has been through five traditions in thirty years and can't stay in any of them — not because she stopped believing but because none of them have been adequate to what she believes. She uses a phrase in her letter that Leon has never shown to anyone. He doesn't know how she has it. He goes.
Twelve candidates. Three days. One round table where no promoter comes through the door and no topic is off limits. Leon Scheffield didn’t want to do a conference. Marguerite Fontaine told him this wasn’t a conference. She was right.
What happens over three days in a room outside Kansas City is what happens when someone stops getting in the way of the prior grace and lets it do what it does. Twelve people who arrived performing their best answers leave carrying the questions underneath them.
Before Every Tradition
You came from somewhere specific. This book is for the specific shape of your somewhere.
Across nine chapters, six Christian traditions are addressed on their own terms — Reformed/Calvinist, Progressive/Post-Evangelical, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Baptist/Evangelical, Catholic, Methodist/Wesleyan — with each tradition’s wounds named precisely, its texts read carefully, and the prior grace it was always pointing toward made visible.
