BOOK REVIEW:
The Worshiping Life: Meditations on the Order of Worship. By Lisa Nichols Hickman. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. 162 pp. ISBN 0664227597.

In an age in which people experience all too keenly the disorder of life, Lisa Nichols Hickman offers a way to order and give meaning to life through the movement of worship. The Worshipping Life explores the vital connection between our daily living and the gathering of God’s people in worship. She offers thoughtful meditations on the basic movements of worship: gathering, proclaiming, responding, sealing and bearing out.  In these meditations, Hickman moves deftly between the experience of congregational worship and the experience of God in the desert, in poetry, in the hospital, in art, at the movies and in human relationships. She discovers the same movement of God’s Spirit in our lives and in the world around us that we experience in worship. Like an expert weaver, she moves back and forth between the life of worship and life in the world to create a colorful tapestry of grace-filled living. Just as Jesus instructed the disciples to gather the left-over pieces of bread after the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, we gather the bits and pieces of our lives and bring them to God in worship.  In singing the hymns of faith, hearing the scriptures, proclaiming of the word, praying for one another, receiving the sacraments and bearing out the word, we come to see how all of life is worship. She writes, “The challenge for us is to continue that story [of the faith] as we walk out of the doors and into our lives so that the chapters of worship read the same as the pages of our lives.” (p. 154).

The strength of the work is found in Hickman’s capacity to discover the sacred in the ordinary through her poetic ear, her keen eye and her pastoral spirit.  She draws upon her knowledge of scripture and theology and her own personal experiences to illuminate the movements of worship and life. She uses poetry quite effectively and discusses numerous popular films to illustrate her ideas.  The stories that arise from her pastoral experiences combined with her insight into the world around her are perhaps the strongest and most effective aspects of the work. The book could have been strengthened by drawing upon more biblical and theological resources.  The Worshipping Life is a good book for an adult study group in the church to use to deepen their understanding of Reformed worship and to explore the patterns of God’s activity in their own lives. In an effort to appeal to a consumeristic and entertainment mindset, many congregations seem to have lost the biblical and theological foundation for the order and movement of worship.  The Worshipping Life is a good place to begin to help us recover the understanding of why the movement of worship matters in leading us to live our lives to the glory of God.

Lewis F. Galloway
Senior Pastor
Second Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis, Indiana

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING 2006, VOL. 6, #1.