It began as a question.

Not a business plan. A question that kept finding me on ordinary mornings — in the car, in the middle of doing something else — and never quite left:

What would it look like to build something where faith and everyday life weren't two separate things?

Because that's the part I've never been able to shake. Faith isn't only the thing we do on Sunday. It's in how we live and love and create, how we dress, how we gather, how we treat whoever happens to be standing in front of us. It's a Tuesday afternoon. It's the whole ordinary week, lit from the inside.

The name came before almost everything else.

I kept coming back to the picture of a city on a hill — a light that can't be hidden, and isn't trying to be. When that name wasn't available, the search led somewhere better. Hilltop kept the picture. Collective left room for something larger than a store.

It was fall, October 2025. I was sitting on the couch in my living room when I bought the domain, and that was the first thing that made it real.

I spent twelve years learning how to sell things.

A merchant for the largest retailer in the country. Twelve years learning what makes a person slow down, pick something up, and decide it belongs in their life. Margin. Gross profit. How to hold a process together on the day everything comes apart.

I was good at it, and I'm grateful for all of it. I also wanted to leave, and I couldn't see how that would work.

Then this year it did — in a way I could never have arranged for myself.

Twelve years of trade, and finally somewhere to point it.

So of course my first instinct was a shop.

Clothing, home, jewelry, journals, mugs — all the things you'd expect. But the more I built it, the less it felt like the point. I didn't want to put a verse on something for the sake of calling it a Christian product.

The products could be part of Hilltop. They didn't have to be Hilltop.

What I know how to do hasn't changed. Where it's pointed has. Stewardship instead of quota.

So the question got bigger.

I stopped asking what Hilltop could sell and started asking what Hilltop could be.

Meeting downtown to serve. Collecting clothing for people who need it. Volunteering. Partnering with churches. Gathering to study, to eat, and to talk honestly about what we believe — the kind of conversation that runs long because nobody wants to get up from the table.

A community of people who don't only profess their faith. They practice it.

It isn't a place for people who have it together.

I don't want Hilltop to be a perfect place for Christians. I want it to be a place where people gather, eat, talk honestly, and figure it out next to other people doing the same.

It should be fun. That part matters to me more than almost anything else here.

The message is simple.

Be a light wherever you go. And that light is Christ, who lives in us.

Everything else — the products, the photographs, the gatherings, and one day a room with coffee and books and music and space to sit down — is built around that.