Brian Doerksen gave evangelicalism its soundtrack but not its current theology

(RNS) — When Canadian worship leader Brian Doerksen, writer of some of the most iconic worship songs of the 1990s, died on July 21 at age 60, many prominent celebrity worship leaders created public tributes and for good reason. Doerksen’s “Refiner’s Fire,” “I Lift My Eyes Up (Psalm 121)” and “Come, Now Is the Time to Worship” transcended denominational and national boundaries. Long before the rise of worship music powerhouses Passion, Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation or Maverick City, Doerksen and the Vineyard Church where he led were creating modern worship music and popularizing many of the forms they now utilize. 

Yet while Doerksen helped create the musical language of contemporary worship, the theological vision animating much of today’s worship music took a different, more militant path.

Doerksen’s sound emerged from his work leading music at a Vineyard Church, a small denomination with an outsize influence in the global Christian movement. Through worship leaders like Doerksen, the Vineyard did arguably more than any other Christian denomination to popularize modern worship music in the late 20th century, and — along the way — to reshape the theology and practice of evangelicalism in the United States and beyond. 

Vineyard emerged from the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, when young evangelicals embraced charismatic spirituality and guitar, folk and rock music that often depicted Jesus as a gentle, loving savior who above all desired intimacy with his people. By the late 1980s, when Doerksen began leading worship at Langley Vineyard Christian Fellowship, many of the so-called worship wars had already been won. 

Rock bands are now commonplace in 21st century Christian liturgies in part because Vineyard musicians helped them gain wide acceptance and eventually overtake older forms of Christian music. Drum kits and slide projectors began to replace choirs, organs and hymnals. Young men with guitars like Doerksen replaced choir directors and organists. 

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But as a worship leader in the Vineyard movement, Doerksen was far more than just a guy with a guitar. There is perhaps no form of American Protestantism more defined by and intertwined with the songs it produces than the Vineyard Church. 

“Everything we’ve tried to be is in our songs,” said Caleb Maskell, associate national director of theology and education for Vineyard USA. “The Vineyard has always sung our theology.” 

Well-produced worship music was key to growing existing Vineyard churches and planting new congregations.

“Brian wrote a lot of the songs that became bedrock for Vineyard churches,” Maskell said. 

Doerksen’s songs were accessible, simply constructed, with catchy refrains and easy-to-play guitar rhythms. They often combined biblical language, emotional vulnerability and an invitation to experience God intimately, extending and updating the Jesus Music of the ’70s and ’80s. 

Doerksen’s work shaped worship cultures in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, along with his fellow countrymen David Ruis and Andy Park, who wrote many of the biggest worship songs of the ’90s. As part of the “cosmopolitan class” of the charismatic movement, the worship leaders and their music criss-crossed the globe and took Vineyard theologies far beyond the national and doctrinal boundaries.

By the 1990s, Vineyard had produced a series of “Jesus is my boyfriend” hits. Craig Musseau’s “Pour Out My Heart,” possibly the quintessential Vineyard song and one of the movement’s biggest worship songs, depicts a worshipper crying out to Jesus as a gentle, loving savior. “Every cry,” the song claims, “you are listening, no matter what state my heart is in.” Doerksen’s “Refiner’s Fire” expresses an evangelical need for holiness paired with a passionate need for God, “You are my only hope, You’re my only prayer.”

In a way, Doerksen might be remembered as something like a Doctor of the Vineyard Church — not because he held a particular academic credential, but because he interpreted and articulated the movement’s faith and practice. Doerksen used art to create Christian theology.

But while Vineyard transformed how evangelicals worshipped, another movement emerging in the ’90s increasingly shaped what they sang about.

In 1997, revival fires burned at the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, an Assemblies of God event. Worship leaders like Lindell Cooley created music that reflected the gathering’s themes of spiritual warfare and the Christian’s conquest of Satan. “I went to the enemy’s camp,” sang Cooley, “and I took back what he stole from me… Satan is under my feet.”

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The Brownsville Revival fused vibrant spiritual warfare with conservative American political activism and helped shape the emerging worship industry when members of a worship band called Zilch encountered Vineyard worship leader Andy Park leading a service there in Pensacola. Reborn as Sonicflood alongside Jeff Deyo, the band translated this rock-’em-sock-’em spirituality into a commercially successful form, helping popularize it through their landmark self-titled 1999 praise-and-worship album.

While Doerksen and the Vineyard contributed in innumerable ways to the rise of the stadium rock-driven form of modern worship, the theological substance of 21st century worship music is largely an extension of the Assemblies of God theology present at Brownsville. His most enduring songs imagine Jesus as a gentle friend closer than a brother. Today’s worship houses like Bethel and Hillsong increasingly emphasize conquest, victory, armies, spiritual warfare and the prosperous life awaiting the believer from a God who fights on their behalf. 

The changing face of American evangelical politics is increasingly being shaped not just by the musical forms, but the theological substance of those Pentecostal and charismatic communities. In a study supported by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), my colleagues and I found that these forms of Christianity are gaining ground among Americans who describe themselves as evangelical or “born again.” 

Today’s Pentecostals and charismatics are often younger and more racially diverse than the broader evangelical population, while remaining firmly conservative on major social questions like gender and sexuality, abortion and immigration. And as they ascend in the American evangelical landscape, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians are reframing these disputes about public policy theologically. The American body politic is a spiritual battlefield, and in this rendering, warfare may be what is required to bring the nation under the dominion of God.

Doerksen’s legacy thus lies not only in the musical language he helped give contemporary evangelicalism, but in the vision of God his songs invited worshippers to inhabit: intimate, merciful and near. As charismatic Christianity assumes a larger role in American religious and political life, the contrast between that vision and today’s more militant worship culture has never mattered more.

(Leah Payne is a faculty lead at Portland Seminary, an affiliated scholar at the Public Religion Research Institute and director of Candler School of Theology’s Summer Institute for Global Charismatic-Pentecostal Studies. She is also a podcast host and author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.) 

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