The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.
Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed,
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, ‘How long?’
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.
Public domain hymn text (1866). Words by Samuel John Stone.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Samuel John Stone was an English clergyman who wrote this hymn's text in 1866 as one of a planned series of twelve hymns specifically illustrating the individual clauses of the Apostles' Creed, a project he undertook largely in direct response to a bitter and very public theological controversy then unfolding within the Church of England, centered on a South African bishop named John William Colenso, who had published writings sharply questioning the historical accuracy and inerrancy of parts of the Old Testament.
Stone, deeply troubled by what he saw as Colenso's undermining of settled Christian doctrine from within the church's own ordained leadership, intended his hymn series specifically to reaffirm traditional, orthodox belief in clear, singable, memorable congregational verse, this particular hymn corresponding directly to the creed's line affirming belief in 'the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints.'
The hymn's central image of the Church as a single unified 'bride,' purchased at the cost of Christ's own blood and held together by 'one Lord, one faith, one birth' regardless of the many different nations and denominations that individual congregations might belong to, was Stone's own direct answer to a controversy that threatened, in his view, to fracture that same unity from within.
Set to music by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley's own brother Samuel, the hymn went on to considerably outlive the specific nineteenth-century Colenso controversy that had originally prompted its writing, becoming one of the standard hymns of church unity sung at ordinations, church anniversaries, and ecumenical gatherings across a very wide range of denominations that Stone himself, writing in the heat of a specific Anglican doctrinal dispute, likely never fully anticipated it would eventually serve.
