On July 21, Brian Doerksen went home to be with Jesus. He passed away from cancer at the age of 60. Like many other Christians, I mourned.

Brian Doerksen was a contemporary Christian singer/songwriter/worship leader from Abbotsford, British Columbia. His songs impacted people across Canada and also people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Among numerous other awards, Brian received a Gospel Music Association Dove Award in 2003, only the second Canadian to receive the award.

Among Brian’s best known songs are “Refiner’s Fire” and “Come Now is the Time to Worship.” The song that has inspired and encouraged me the most is one of his earliest songs called “Faithful One”:

            Faithful one, so unchanging

            Ageless one, You’re my rock of peace

            Lord of all I depend on You

            I call out to You

            Again and again

            I call out to You

            Again and again

            You are my rock in times of trouble

            You lift me up when I fall down

            All through the storm, Your love is

            The anchor, My hope is in You alone

What strikes me about this song is that it starts and ends with a focus on God and who He is, not on our own struggles or experiences. It is, in every sense of the words, a worship song. And it reminds me very much of the Psalms.  

Brian and his wife had four daughters and two sons. His sons both have fragile X syndrome. He considered his sons a great blessing, and being a father drove him into closer dependence on his Heavenly Father.

I was not personally a friend of Brian’s, but, like many people, I felt I knew him, and I respected him greatly. And there were some connections. Brian was raised and mentored in a Mennonite Brethren church where I was later a member. As a writer and editor, I had the privilege of interviewing Brian at least a couple of times. When I recently looked up the article about him on Wikipedia, I was astounded to discover that two of the first four footnotes to that article referred to articles that I had written about him. Through those interviews, I found Brian to be both a great worship leader and a deeply devout Christian. He gained international fame but remained humble and accessible. I had been assigned to do a short interview, but I found that he had so much that was worthwhile to say that I stretched it into two long articles. What struck me was that Brian was essentially a worship leader. He was a great musician and songwriter, but he subordinated that to worshipping God. In one of those interviews, Brian said that all church music should be folk music. That is, he was convinced that music in church should be sung by the people, not sung to them by professionals.