- Performance: Bart Millard reads his own story alongside the other voices in his life, and the result is raw and unpolished in exactly the right way - no professional narrator could replicate the weight of hearing him describe losing Shannon's brother in his own voice.
- What it covers: Faith under pressure, marriage and distance, grief as a spiritual test
- Feel: Honest and searching, with the fragility of a private conversation
- Our call: Even If is a faith memoir that doesn't package its suffering neatly, and Millard's self-narration makes the discomfort and the hope feel equally real.
Bart Millard's story is already partially known by anyone who's seen the I Can Only Imagine film, but the audiobook of Even If functions as something that film could not: a record of what happened after. The song swept the airwaves in January 2002, MercyMe became a household name in Christian music, and then - as Millard tells it with disarming directness - the life that success was supposed to secure started coming apart at the seams. At five hours and six minutes, this is a short audiobook in terms of runtime, but it carries considerable density per hour.
The craft here isn't primarily literary. Millard and his wife Shannon are not writers in the conventional sense, and the book reads with the looseness of a story told rather than constructed. But that quality, which in another context might be a weakness, becomes a genuine strength when Millard is narrating the material himself. The three-perspective structure - drawing on Bart, Shannon, and their son Sam - means the audiobook moves between voices and registers, and hearing those different tones in Millard's own delivery gives the switching a texture that a single professional narrator couldn't create.
Faith That Doesn't Depend on Being Saved
What separates this audiobook from the straightforward Christian celebrity memoir is the specificity of what Millard is willing to describe. Shannon's brother dying in a tragic accident. Their second child born prematurely. Their oldest diagnosed with diabetes. The cumulative pile-up of loss happening precisely as the band's success was becoming impossible to step back from - the weight of carrying I Can Only Imagine as a live performance night after night while privately wondering if the God the song was about was still good in any operationally meaningful sense. That last question is the soul of the book, and Millard earns the right to ask it because he doesn't answer it cheaply.
The song the book draws from - also called "Even If," from MercyMe's 2017 album - is built around an older theological tradition: the idea that faith does not depend on favorable outcomes. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego telling the king they believed God could save them from the furnace, but that they would worship him even if he didn't. Millard writes about arriving at that conviction not through theological argument but through lived experience of what it feels like when God doesn't intervene in the ways you've asked for. It's a harder position to write from than triumph, and the audiobook is better for his willingness to stay in it.
Arena Faith Meets a Marriage Under Strain
The audiobook succeeds most in its middle section, where the band's professional life and the Millards' private life are at their furthest remove from each other. Bart describes being on the road, carrying the expectation that comes with being the man who wrote Christian music's most beloved song, while at home Shannon is managing medical crises and a marriage that is straining under the absence. The description of that disjunction between public faith and private doubt is one of the more honest treatments of the Christian artist's peculiar position that I've encountered in memoir form - the sense that the message you're delivering to an arena has to remain intact regardless of what's happening in your actual life.
Shannon's presence in the narrative is crucial. Her voice brings the domestic reality that Bart's road perspective can only describe from the outside. Listeners who've read accounts of life as a musician's spouse will recognize the specific shape of this loneliness, and the audiobook is honest about the damage it caused and about the work of repair. The book doesn't pretend the marriage emerged from crisis without effort. That honesty is what keeps Even If from functioning as a simple victory narrative.
Five Hours That Move Faster Than a Crisis
Listeners who are not embedded in contemporary Christian music culture may need to orient themselves at the opening. The world of Christian radio, worship bands, and the specific commercial ecosystem MercyMe operates within is assumed rather than explained. If you come to this audiobook without that context, a short amount of background reading on the band will make the early chapters more legible. The book's deepest resonance is probably available to listeners with some faith background, though the account of sustained grief and marriage under pressure is not genre-specific.
The three-voice structure, while effective in the audiobook version, does mean the narrative moves at different registers. Bart's sections have the quality of public testimony - shaped for an audience. Shannon's sections carry a different and more private texture. Sam's contributions are briefer and often serve as emotional punctuation rather than sustained narration. Some listeners will wish for more Shannon; the book's emotional core is in those sections. The running time of five hours means the story moves quickly through some events that could sustain more attention, and listeners who want deeper excavation of any single crisis may find the pace slightly compressed.
A Single-Session Listen for Most Listeners
Listeners who connect with MercyMe's music and want context for the theological position behind the band's later material will find this audiobook rewarding and direct. Readers drawn to faith memoirs that treat suffering without packaging it into testimony will find Millard more willing than most to sit in genuine uncertainty. The book is explicitly Christian in its framing and resolution, so listeners without a faith context should know that the book does ultimately land in a theological position rather than in open-ended questioning. Parents, partners of people in demanding careers, and anyone who has navigated the tension between outward role and inward reality will recognize specific moments here regardless of religious background. At just over five hours, it's a single-session listen for most dedicated audiobook listeners.
Do I need to have seen the I Can Only Imagine film to understand this audiobook?
No. Even If covers a different period than the film - it takes place primarily after MercyMe's breakthrough success in 2002, not during Bart's childhood. The book is about what happened to the band and family in the years following the song's explosion onto Christian radio, including grief, illness, and marital pressure. Some familiarity with the first film provides useful context but is not required.
Is this audiobook explicitly Christian, and how does that affect listeners without a faith background?
Yes, the book is explicitly Christian in framing and conclusion. The central question - whether God is still good when circumstances are not - is engaged from within a faith perspective, not as a philosophical question. Listeners without that background can still find resonance in the memoir's treatment of grief, marriage under pressure, and the cost of public life, but the book does not bracket the theological material for secular audiences.
How does Bart Millard's self-narration compare to what a professional narrator would bring to this audiobook?
Self-narration is the right choice here. Millard's voice is not trained for performance, and that limitation becomes an asset - you can hear the unresolved quality in how he describes certain events, particularly the losses that happened when MercyMe was at its most publicly visible. A professional narrator would smooth over exactly the textures that make the audiobook feel like a genuine account rather than a crafted one.
What is the spice level or content rating for this audiobook?
Even If contains no explicit content. The audiobook is entirely appropriate for older teens and adults. The difficult content involves grief, infant health emergencies, marriage conflict, and questions of faith - all of which are handled with candor but without graphic description. It would be suitable for Christian book clubs, small group discussions, or family listening for older teenagers.
