mike hillebrecht
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mike hillebrecht
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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.
Eight years after The Forbidden Sermons, Leon Scheffield is sixty-eight years old and still driving between dying churches, still delivering the sermon that changes things, still carrying the letter his mentor left him about a table he hasn't found yet.
Then a stranger writes to him using words from that letter. Words he's shown to no one.
The Letter follows Leon through one year and six traditions — Reformed, Pentecostal, Progressive, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist/Wesleyan — each one in a specific form of collapse, each one asking him something the sermon he already knows cannot reach. A dying man in Asheville whose hands are shaking. A worship leader in San Antonio who knows the difference between the real thing and the manufactured thing. A deacon in Memphis who is furious at God and done with being handled. A priest in Portland who has been sitting on the truth for six years.
And running alongside all of it: Marguerite Fontaine, a music teacher who has been through every tradition Leon is visiting and belongs to none of them, who appears in cities she wasn't told about, who has been composing a piece of music for seven years that she cannot finish because the final movement is in a place she hasn't been able to reach alone.
What Leon has been calling the prior grace is not the destination of the sermon. It is the ground the sermon was always happening inside of. That discovery requires a year, seven encounters, and a kitchen table in a small town in December.
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.
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.
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.
