HOW TO BUILD ON THE GROUND
The Twelve Intended
Novel by Mike Hillebrecht — third book in the Leon Scheffield trilogy
Three years after the events of The Letter, Leon Scheffield has settled into a quieter version of the itinerant, crisis-driven ministry that has defined his life for over a decade. Marguerite Fontaine — no longer the wandering exile she was when she first found him, now the one who creates the conditions for the work — calls him with a proposal: a regional ministry conference wants him to lead a three-day intensive for twelve young adults discerning a call to ministry. Leon refuses the format on principle — keynotes, panels, session titles — and Marguerite, having anticipated this, has already negotiated it away. No agenda. No promoters in the room. Twelve people, a table, three days, and nothing off-limits. Leon agrees, on her word that these twelve are the right twelve.
What follows is not a curriculum but an interrogation. On Day One, Leon dismantles each candidate’s rehearsed answer to a single question — why are you trying to build — exposing the gap between institutional training and anything the twelve have actually lived. A seminary graduate is cut off mid-sentence. A megachurch staffer cannot name a single person she has ever served for their sake. A worship leader’s platform-built confidence is demolished in a single exchange (“Non-denominational bullshit”) that becomes the day’s turning point. Only Nadia Volkov, a first-generation Christian with no ministry framework at all, gives an answer Leon says he believes entirely: I don’t know if I want to build. I just know I can’t not.
Day Two turns the question backward: what did your traditions get right, and what did they fail to embody. The twelve surface real material — a controlling church’s mechanisms of spiritual abuse, the Catholic hierarchy’s institutional cover-ups, the manufactured feelings of performance-driven worship — alongside what each tradition was reaching for before it curdled. The day’s center of gravity is Pastor Reyna Cole, the only already-ordained pastor at the table, who reframes the whole three days around what she calls the prior grace: a grace that does not wait for an institution to be clean before it operates, proven by four hundred years of a Black church built on cracked ground that produced real faith anyway. Each night, in sessions the narrative never fully shows, Marguerite meets individually with several of the twelve, pressing gently at what Leon’s demolitions left exposed.
On Day Three, Leon asks what each of them will do differently — and one of them, Marcus, finally turns the question back on him: what about you. For the first time in the trilogy, Leon discloses his own wound: a decision he made at thirty-four, as a young pastor, that he still believes was right and that still cost two families everything he could not undo. That afternoon, the retreat’s ordinary food is quietly joined by junk food on the same table — a test almost no one names out loud until Nadia does: he changed the food on purpose. Marguerite enters the conference room for the only time in the book to deliver its central warning and blessing: whatever they build will never be adequate to the grace it is meant to carry. Build anyway. Leon’s final question to each of them — what did you come here believing that you are leaving behind — closes with Nadia: I came here believing I wasn’t enough. I think I’m leaving that behind. Good, Leon says, and the three days end.
An epilogue set three years later follows all twelve into the lives that grew out of that room — a marriage of theology and practice, a return, a resignation, an unresolved question, a stripped-down ministry with no audience left to perform for. It closes on Nadia in Russia, at her grandmother’s side, eighteen months into what was meant to be a two-week visit, writing to a young stranger in Novosibirsk the same words Marguerite once wrote to Leon: I heard you were the one who comes when everything is failing. I need you to come. Not for a church. For me. The chain, unbroken, continues.