mike hillebrecht
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mike hillebrecht
The RV, Grandkids, or a Pew
by mike hillebrecht
Nobody in this book gets fixed. Everybody gets a little more room to breathe.
Forty-six years of marriage. Two thousand miles of Route 66. One road trip neither Walt nor Carol Dunn saw coming.
Walt and Carol are what researchers are now calling "the Dones" — lifelong, faithful
churchgoers who've quietly stopped attending, not out of anger, but because the church that shaped their whole adult lives never quite figured out what to do with them once they got old. When their two weeks with the grandkids ends in Chicago, their longtime pastor and his wife peel off for an open-ended loop of the Great Lakes — and Walt and Carol, instead of heading home, turn the RV south onto the old road.
Their destination: Los Angeles, and an Army friend Walt hasn't seen in fifty years, who has spent his life studying the revival that started in a converted livery stable a few blocks
from where they'll finally meet again.
Along the way, the Dunns meet a whole country's worth of people carrying the same quiet weight in different shapes — a Baptist deacon who's never once trusted his own salvation enough to stop re-earning it; a Catholic couple who kept their devotion and lost their church in the same breath; a young deconstructing family who still pray in secret, ashamed of their own hunger; a woman running a diner at the literal geographic middle of the country who built an entire, solid ethic without ever needing an institution's permission to do it.
Nobody gets a tidy answer. Nobody needs one.
THE LONG FAITHFUL is a novel for anyone who has ever loved an institution that stopped knowing what to do with them — and for anyone who has ever found, on the emptiest stretch of highway, that the ground was there long before they thought to look for it.
What Readers Can Expect
● A slow, character-driven road-trip novel in the tradition of great American travel fiction — more interested in people than plot twists
● An unflinching but deeply compassionate look at institutional faith, aging, grief, and what it means to keep believing when the building stops making room for you
● A sprawling, warmly drawn cast — Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal, post-evangelical, secular, and everything in between — treated with equal dignity and equal honesty
● A forty-six-year marriage rendered with rare tenderness: not a love story that needs saving, just two people still discovering each other after a lifetime together
● A story that trusts its reader — no easy answers, no villains, no one fixed by the end, and no one worse for the journey either
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.
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.
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.
