Two ministers. One pulpit. One soul up for sale.

Lawrence Case and Marcus Price grew up three streets apart in Cincinnati’s West End, ordained together, and arrived at Greater Deliverance Baptist Church side by side with the same dream: to one day stand in the pulpit of the most powerful Black church in the city.

But when the legendary Dr. Hezekiah Malone refuses to step aside, the two men choose two completely different roads.

Marcus walks away. He plants Cornerstone Community Church in a storefront on McMicken Avenue with twenty-seven folding chairs and a calling that is completely his own. He builds slowly, honestly, and with his whole soul.

Lawrence stays. And in staying, he begins to lose himself.

Driven by a hunger for power that he has dressed up as purpose, Lawrence builds a shadow empire inside the church— manipulating deacons, cultivating donors, engineering his own succession while performing ministry from the pulpit every Sunday. The congregation sees the gift. They do not see the cost. And the person paying the highest price is the woman closest to him: his wife Cassandra, who is quietly disappearing inside a marriage she no longer recognizes, fighting battles no one in the congregation knows she is fighting.

Set against the hills and river valleys of Cincinnati, Ohio, A Man To Gain is a gripping novel about ambition and calling, friendship and betrayal, the abuse that hides behind a holy image, and the ancient question that sits at the center of every life: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Mark 8: 36

This is not a church story. This is a story about what happens when a man confuses the gift with the throne, the calling with the climb, and the people he was sent to serve with the stepping stones he uses to get above them.

It is also a story about what is possible when a man refuses to make that trade.