Leading voice

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This article was published 19/10/2019 (2418 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the summer of 2018, Christian singer-songwriter Brian Doerksen shut out the warm weather and even put up holiday decorations to create the right atmosphere to write songs for a Christmas album.

Feeling out of step with life is nothing new for the award-winning recording artist, pastor and speaker, who has made a living for the past three decades writing and performing contemporary Christian music.

“We write the songs before we need them so when we need them, they’re there,” Doerksen says of the role of the songwriter in a telephone interview from the Abbotsford, B.C., home he’s lived in for 50 out of his 54 years.

The writer of well-known songs such as Come, Now is the Time to Worship, and Faithful One, performs at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 27, at Kilcona Park Alliance Church.

More recently, that out-of-step feeling led him to write a song about grief and sadness for a new Christmas album called The Heart of Christmas, released after a long dry spell where he was ready to walk away from a music career because “words tasted like dust.”

He came back to composing after finding solace in the psalms, resonating with the themes of sufferings and darkness and human frailty, and recording them with his band, the SHIYR Poets.

With a dozen or so albums, an international reputation, and a long career performing and leading music in evangelical Christian settings in North America and Europe, Doerksen may have a unique vantage point musically on the state of contemporary worship songs, also referred to as praise and worship music.

“Anybody who’s Christian has sung his music or heard one of his songs,” says Winnipeg musician Jaylene Johnson, who co-wrote two tracks on Doerksen’s Christmas album.

“He has had tremendous influence, particularly in corporate worship.”

Influential or not, Doerksen says his own dark period made him realize most contemporary Christian music does not deal well with suffering, which can prevent people experiencing hard times from finding a connection to worship.

“If the only songs people who are suffering hear… are our God is great, rah, rah, rah, they’re looking at their lives and wondering what’s wrong with me,” says the Juno Award winner, who was raised in the Mennonite tradition.

“Meanwhile, the suffering, the marginalized and the refugees are out.”

In addition to his Christmas album, Doerksen released another with new arrangements of his most popular and best-known songs, including I lift my eyes up and Refiner’s Fire. His new songs on his Christmas album tweak the titles of some classic carols, such as The Second Noel and Just Before a Silent Night.

“I’m writing some of my best songs now… but it will take a miracle for them to be widely sung,” says Doerksen, who experienced several of his songs going viral long before social media and YouTube.

He measures success differently these days, preferring to write what moves him, and enjoying life with his wife of 35 years and their six children, including two sons with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic condition that causes developmental delays.

After four years commuting to a gig as music and worship professor at Prairie College, a Christian post-secondary college in Three Hills, Alta., he’s now back touring as well as mentoring songwriters, most recently in three-day retreats in both Ireland and England.

“What we do as creative people, as songwriters, setting the words in melody is a very high calling, because people remember what they sing more than they read,” says Doerksen, now an independent artist after recording under the Integrity and Vineyard Music Group labels.

Most of all, Doerksen says he wants to honour the trust he feels from people in the pews by producing material that reflects his growing sense of respect for ancient liturgical practices and the mystery of faith.

“I’m trying to write about human truth in the light of love, and I simply believe God is love,” he says.

“I trust ultimately we all fall into love somehow and love is the beating heart of the universe.”

Singer-songwriter Brian Doerksen performs at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 27, at Kilcona Park Alliance Church, 1977 Norris Rd. Admission is by donation.

brenda@suderman.com

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