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The Long Way Back: A Narrative Theology of Return for Men Who Have Wandered Far
Paperback
Series: The Empty Pew, Book 2
Religion General Christian Living
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 26 2026
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.04
Height: 0.73 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Something has gone quiet in you. Maybe it happened slowly - Sunday by Sunday, prayer by prayer, until one morning you found yourself sitting in a church car park watching everyone else go in, unable to make yourself do the same. Maybe it was a single wound: a prayer that wasn't answered, a church that failed you, a God who seemed to disappear exactly when you needed him most. Maybe you've never left, not formally, but the faith that once felt like a living thing has become, over the years, a performance of a faith that used to be real.
This book is for you.
The Long Way Back is a narrative theology of return - for the man who once believed, who perhaps still half-believes, but who has drifted to the edges of faith and doesn't know if the road home is still open.
Using the Prodigal Son as its spine, each chapter travels to the life of a real man - Augustine, CS Lewis, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, John Newton, Thomas Merton, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, GK Chesterton, and others - who went far from faith and came back transformed. Their stories are told fully and honestly, without the sanitised gloss of Sunday school hagiography. These were men who doubted, who sinned, who walked away. And who found, against all reasonable expectation, that the Father was already watching the road.
This is not a book of easy answers or altar-call pressure. It is closer to what CS Lewis called 'theology told through story' - truth carried inside narrative, arriving not at the front door of a man's defences but at the back window of his imagination.
This book asks one question: What would it mean to get up?
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