Chasing Starlight: Deconstruction of a Worship Leader

She led thousands in worship for twenty years. She believed every word she sang. Then the stars went out.

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"What I appreciate about Chasing Starlight is that Lyric Forest lets the story stay complicated. She does not flatten faith into stupidity or leaving into triumph... This book is for people who know that losing faith can feel less like changing your mind and more like losing the atmosphere you were once breathing." — Britt Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality

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You are invited inside the mind of a worship leader, to witness the careful formation of a faith that grew into impassioned devotion, and then the grief and upheaval of watching it come undone.

Lyric Forest was born into the Mennonite tradition and raised in conservative evangelical Christianity. A trained musician, singer-songwriter, and career worship leader, she served a wide spectrum of Christian traditions before finding her theological home in the Reformed faith, where her love for God grew deep, coherent roots.

After two decades of serving wholeheartedly in Presbyterian and Baptist churches, a crisis of faith and an international move set her deconstruction in motion - carrying her through disillusionment, grief, and the painstaking work of rebuilding a life worth living.

This is the story of an artist chasing light wherever it leads.

Featuring 48 original chapter illustrations by the author in colored pencil, ink, and watercolor - each one capturing emotion, struggle, or wonder that words alone couldn't hold.

Chasing Starlight is a memoir told in four parts, following the arc of the very liturgy the author spent decades leading others through: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration.

Movement I: First Light traces a childhood steeped in Mennonite harmonies, a father's dramatic conversion from the streets of Spanish Harlem, and a young woman finding her voice of faith at a piano.

Movement II: The Dark Night follows the slow accumulation of questions that the answers could no longer satisfy, through years of ministry, motherhood, and a cross-continental move.

Movement III: Dead Reckoning is the freefall - navigating without fixed points, grieving a God who didn't answer, dismantling a worldview that had explained everything.

Movement IV: Chasing Starlight is what comes after: not resolution, but the stubborn pursuit of awe, meaning, and a life worth living without a cosmic framework to hold it.

This book describes what it felt like from the inside - the beauty of believing, the cost of keeping belief as long as she did, and the terror and strange freedom of letting it go. Reformed readers will find their tradition rendered with accuracy and respect. Skeptical readers will understand, perhaps for the first time, why a thoughtful person would give her whole life to it - and why losing it left a wound.

"This is not a story with a resolution. I have not arrived anywhere certain. I am still in the chasing."

For those who have loved God sincerely and found themselves uncertain. For those still inside the fortress who want to understand why someone would leave. For anyone who has ever looked up at the sky and reached.