He Gave the Church Back Its Sad Songs

Cedar Valley News
July 24, 2026
He Gave the Church Back Its Sad Songs
By Dan Larson

A man died Tuesday morning in Abbotsford, British Columbia, at home, in his sleep, with his family around him. His name was Brian Doerksen, and I did not know it until Wednesday.

I should say plainly, because it matters to what follows, his songs are not sung in my meetinghouse. He was a Vineyard man, raised among the Mennonite Brethren, writing worship music for churches which are not mine. I am a Latter-day Saint. We do not share a hymnal.

And yet I have spent two days grateful for him.

He wrote songs sung by millions in many languages. If you have sat in almost any Protestant church in the last thirty years, you have sung his words without knowing whose they were. He was, by every account, a quiet man about it.

But here is what he is being remembered for by the people who knew the work best, and it is why I am writing about a man from another church on a Friday morning.

He gave the church back its sad songs.

Somewhere in the last few generations, the singing in many congregations drifted almost entirely upward. Bright, major, victorious. Everything resolved. And a person carrying something heavy could come in on a Sunday and find nothing in the service sounding like the inside of his week.

The old book never had this problem. The Psalms are full of complaint. Whole songs of them are somebody telling God, at length and without apology, how bad it has gotten and how long it has gone on. Much of the ancient hymnbook is grief set to music, and nobody thought it irreverent.

Doerksen was among the first modern writers to put lament back in the mouths of ordinary people on a Sunday morning. He believed a church should be able to sing the hard thing out loud, together, without hurrying to the bright part.

I have needed this in my own work more times than I can count.

Some years ago a woman in my stake lost the person she loved most, and I watched for months what our people did to her. We loved her. And nearly all of us, myself included, met her sorrow with a repair. She would begin the hard thing, and somebody handed her a reason. He is in a better place. The Lord has a plan. You will see him again. All of it true, and all of it delivered about four sentences too early.

What she needed was somebody to let the sad verse finish.

Here is the part which has kept me up, and it is why this is not a heavy column.

Doerksen learned only days before he died how far the cancer had gone. His kidneys failed the morning before. And in those last days, by the accounts of people in the room, he kept encouraging them. He thanked the doctors and nurses who could not save him. He was grateful to the end.

Consider it. The man who spent thirty years teaching the church to sing its grief did not, at the end, sing only grief. He sang both. He held lament and gratitude in the same hands, at the same hour, and never made anybody choose between them.

There is the lesson. It took him a lifetime to teach and a week to prove.

You may say the hard thing out loud. You are not being faithless when you do. And the person across from you does not need you to fix it, or explain it, or hurry it toward the good part. Grief and gratitude are not rivals. They live in the same house, and most of us have been trying to evict one of them for years.

This Sunday, in thousands of rooms, people will sing his songs, and most will not know his name. Some will be sitting in the worst week of their lives.

And if somebody comes to you before then and begins to tell you the hard thing, let them finish. Do not reach for the silver lining. Sit there in the minor key, all the way to the end of the verse.

The bright part will keep. It always does.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Who let you finish the hard thing without hurrying you past it? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Brian Doerksen was real. The Canadian worship songwriter died at his family home in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on July 21, 2026, peacefully in his sleep after a swift decline from advanced cancer; his family had announced only days earlier, with doctors still working to identify the disease, and his kidneys failed the morning before his death. Raised in a Mennonite Brethren family, he joined the staff of Langley Vineyard in his early twenties and wrote songs sung in many languages, among them Refiner’s Fire, Light the Fire Again, Come Now Is the Time to Worship, Faithful One, and Hope of the Nations. Those who knew the work credit him with helping restore lament to modern congregational singing, and those with him at the end describe a man who kept encouraging others and giving thanks. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.