On Thursday November 9, speaker and song writer BRIAN DOERKSEN held a round table discussion with students taking the two-week Intensive program offered by SSU's Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies. 

Raised on the west coast of Canada in Abbotsford B.C., Brian Doerksen has always had a passion for expressing worship through music. In the late 90’s he lived in the UK for 2 years, where he trained worship leaders and songwriters in the UK and Ireland and produced ‘Hungry’ (Best Worship Project 2001 Praise Awards – Worship Leader Magazine) and “Come now is the time” (number one on CCLI Canada chart in 2003). After returning to live in Canada , he continued to produce for Vineyard Music and then did his first recording with Integrity in Dublin , Ireland called “YOU SHINE” in 2002. Brian was presented with the “International Award” in 2003 by the Gospel Music Association in America.

Brian's first studio worship album 'Holy God' will be released in Canada and Europe in late November 06, in January 07 through the Hosanna Club (USA), and in US bookstores March 2007.

HEAR a portion of Brian's roundtable discussion with ICEWS Intensive program students

(courtesy of Joel Mason's podcast site) >>>

LEARN more about the Institute for Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies >>>

READ some portions of transcript from Brian's roundtable discussion below:

 

"A REVOLUTION OF HONESTY" NEEDED IN THE CHURCH

My real teaching passion is to try and encourage all of us who are in worship ministry to not get stuck in what I’m going to call “no man’s land” – this sort of middle ground where we’re not ‘God-centric’ and we’re not being totally honest and authentic about our humanity.  Instead, we spend so much time in our gatherings singing nice songs that don’t really risk…that aren’t dangerous songs, they’re not dangerous prayers, they’re just nice and very generic, very safe, very nice, lots of nice…fairly upbeat…it’s just nice. 

But my passion (and, I think, dream as a worship leader) is that we’re supposed to actually as worship leaders be revealing God.  We’re supposed to be radically, dangerously, presenting the awesome God in all of his facets from Creator, to Saviour, to Commander, to Father, to Husband, to…all of the aspects of the character of God—that’s why they’re there.  People haven’t come to our gatherings to be entertained (though somehow often we carry on in churches as if they have).

So [people] have come to be fed by God.  So we’re supposed to be God-centric, but we’re supposed to do that in a way that is completely authentic to our humanity—and that’s what is very, very difficult to pull off because most leaders in the church, they don’t want to see authenticity, they don’t want to see/hear that honesty…what they want is they want you to perform for them: they want you to be all scrubbed up, all nice, and come and sing some nice praise songs and we’re all happy, and then you all go home.  But it’s a complete farce, and the world knows it more than the church does; they know it more clearly than we do.

So, somehow there has to be a revolution of honesty that sweeps through the church.  I’m incredibly grateful for what’s happened over the last 20 years, but I think in a lot of ways we’ve stopped short: we’ve exchanged one batch of songs for another batch of songs and we think we’re now into intimate worship.

 

"DANGEROUS" WORSHIP LEADS TO REAL COMMUNITY

In Revelation it talks about “lukewarm”; it’s kind of this “nice.” I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life on “nice.” I want to take the risk to be dangerous about who God is, and I want to take the risk to reveal what is really going on in my humanity.

In the evangelical world, we’ve done tons of focus on the character of God as “God as Saviour” but there’s tons of other aspects of the character of God that we almost never deal with in our songs, and they’re just as clear and they’re just as biblical, and they’re woven throughout.  So, my thing is, “Let’s expand.”

We need to take more risks in our worship, but we also need to take more risks in revealing our own [humanity]—we need to be more vulnerable.  We need to reveal what it is we’re really feeling and not think that that human-Divine encounter somehow always needs to be censored and padded and made nice…it’s raw… whenever I do some of this stuff the first reaction is always one of like *initial shock, quizzical tilt of the head*, but then there is usually a rushing into that place afterwards because people are finally recognizing, “Oh, we can be real!”  And hopefully the end result is real community.

I was ministering at Church in Hawaii in Honolulu and I remember saying to the Lord… (I just encountered these people who had incredible community, incredible relationship, God was saving people, all this stuff was happening), and I remember thinking: “I’ll go anywhere, I’ll do anything to be a part of something like this.” You don’t get that kind of real community if you just play the game of performance worship; you get that [kind of real community] eventually as a result of taking big risks—big risks with how we express who God is and big risks with how we’re doing [personally].