mike hillebrecht
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mike hillebrecht
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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.
The first thing Leon Scheffield says to the twelve candidates is a question.
The second thing he says, to the first person who answers it, is: ‘Non-denominational bullshit. Try again.’
This was never going to be a conference. Marguerite Fontaine negotiated the terms before Leon agreed to them — twelve people, a table, no promoters in the room, no topic off limits — because she has spent three years learning to create the conditions for what Leon carries. She walked into Clairmont carrying an unfinished composition and left it completed. She has been making rooms for the prior grace ever since.
The twelve candidates she selected are about to spend three days finding out that everything they were trained to give as an answer is the introduction to a question they haven’t been asked yet. A seminary graduate who has an answer for everything. A megachurch apprentice who has never sat with a dying person. A deconstructor who has been tearing things down for three years without building anything to replace them. A survivor of a controlling church who doesn’t yet know the difference between not reproducing the damage and building something real. And one young woman who says, on Day One, that she doesn’t know if she wants to build — she just knows she can’t not. Leon stops. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is the only answer anyone has given me today that I believe entirely.’
Three days. One room. Twelve people who are about to discover that the ground the institutions were built on was always more prior than the institutions.
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.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
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.
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.
