On a summer morning in 1997, walking the streets of London at what he later called the lowest point of his life, Brian Doerksen heard a song, in his words, floating in the air. He built an opening line around it that would travel farther than almost anything else he ever wrote: "Come, now is the time to worship." Doerksen, the Canadian worship leader and songwriter behind that song and others including "Refiner's Fire" and "Faithful One," died on July 21, 2026, at his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was 60.

He had grown up on the other side of the world from that London morning, in a multigenerational Mennonite Brethren farming family in Abbotsford, graduating from the Mennonite Educational Institute in 1983. At 19 he married his high school sweetheart, Joyce, and the couple spent their first years together serving with Youth With A Mission in Southeast Asia before he joined the staff of Langley Vineyard Christian Fellowship in his early twenties. As worship pastor there through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, he wrote "Faithful One" and "Refiner's Fire," songs that outlasted the small congregation that first sang them, according to Christian Today. It was also in this period, at a 1989 worship conference in Anaheim, California, that he met bassist and producer Les Moir, beginning a working partnership that lasted the rest of his career.

The London years that produced "Come, Now Is the Time to Worship" began in freefall rather than momentum. Doerksen had poured himself into a stage musical called "Father's House," and when it collapsed financially he and Joyce were, in his own description, broke and homeless, living for a time in a caravan in California, according to a Cross Rhythms interview. Over breakfast, Vineyard founder John Wimber connected him to fellow Vineyard leader John Mumford in England, and within weeks Doerksen was training worship leaders and songwriters across the British and Irish Vineyard network. Around the same time, he and Joyce learned that two of their sons had Fragile X syndrome. It was on a prayer walk during that unsettled season, questioning his calling and his purpose, that the song arrived nearly whole. It was released the following year on the live album "Winds of Worship, Vol. 12: Live From London," according to the hymn history published by Discipleship Ministries.

Back in Canada, he produced "Hungry" in 1999, one of Vineyard Music's best-selling live recordings, then signed with Integrity Music in 2002 and released "You Shine," recorded live in Dublin. The Gospel Music Association gave him its International Award in 2003. His 2007 album "Holy God" won six Covenant Awards from the Gospel Music Association of Canada, including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year, and the record went on to win the JUNO Award for Contemporary Christian/Gospel Album of the Year in 2008.

He published a book, "Make Love, Make War," in 2009, and by his own account the years that followed were harder ones: a relational breakdown within his faith community left him moving through what his own biography calls dark and difficult years in 2011 and 2012. He kept writing anyway. Around 2013 he co-founded The SHIYR Poets, a band devoted to setting the Psalms, laments included, to music, and in 2014 he helped establish the Music and Worship Arts program at Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta, the same year Canada's Covenant Awards gave him a Lifetime Achievement honor. Younger songwriters including Brenton Brown, Kathryn Scott, and Marc James counted him as a mentor.

The songs kept coming into his sixties. "Grateful" won Inspirational Album of the Year at Canada's Gospel Music Awards in 2019, and in 2025 he released "Love for a Lifetime," twelve songs written across more than four decades of marriage to Joyce. In January 2026, six months before he died, he recorded a new version of "Come, Now Is the Time to Worship" with the band House of Worship and singer Leeland.

He died at 6:45 that morning, family members said. Joyce Doerksen wrote that "our beloved Brian passed away peacefully in his sleep at his family home, surrounded by those who loved him most," adding that "till the very end, Brian continued to love those around him, encouraging them in who they are," according to the Gospel Music Association. Vineyard Worship called him "one of the fathers of Vineyard Worship" and said that "his life reflected the One he so faithfully sang about," according to Movieguide. He is survived by Joyce, his wife of more than 40 years, and their four daughters and two sons.

Les Moir, the bassist and producer who met Doerksen in 1989 and worked alongside him for decades, remembered him in Premier Christianity as a calm, consistent, humble, loyal, pure hearted man of integrity, and hardworking.

That morning of crisis in London produced the line congregations still sing without a second thought, and it is not hard to find where the rest of it endures. It is in the songwriting course still taught at Prairie College, in the Psalms The SHIYR Poets still set to music, in the twelve songs about staying married that he finished a year before he died. On ordinary Sundays, in languages he never spoke, strangers who never heard his name open worship with now is the time, repeating words a grieving father once heard on a London street and chose, against every circumstance, to believe.