Lyrics
In Christ there is no east or west,
In Him no south or north,
But one great fellowship of love
Throughout the whole wide earth.
In Him shall true hearts everywhere
Their high communion find.
His service is the golden cord
Close binding humankind.
Join hands, then, children of the faith,
Whate'er your race may be!
Who serves my Father as a child
Is surely kin to me.
In Christ now meet both east and west,
In Him meet south and north;
All Christly souls are one in Him,
Throughout the whole wide earth.
Public domain hymn text (published 1908). Words by John Oxenham, pen name of William A. Dunkerley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
William Arthur Dunkerley, an English novelist and poet who wrote under the pen name John Oxenham — borrowed from the title of a Charles Kingsley novel — composed this hymn's text for a specific occasion rather than for ordinary congregational worship. In 1908 the London Missionary Society mounted a major public exhibition in London called The Orient in London, which over its run drew an estimated quarter of a million visitors. Dunkerley wrote the words as the closing section of The Pageant of Darkness and Light, a libretto staged as part of that exhibition, under the original title "No East or West."
The hymn was written as a direct, deliberate answer to a much more famous line. Rudyard Kipling's 1889 "The Ballad of East and West" had opened with the now-proverbial claim, "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Oxenham's hymn takes up that exact geography — east, west, north, south — and insists on the opposite: that in Christ, the divisions Kipling assumed to be permanent dissolve into "one great fellowship of love."
The text did not appear as a standalone poem in print until 1913, in Oxenham's collection Bees in Amber, five years after its first performance as part of the missionary pageant. It has since been paired most often with the tune ST. PETER, composed decades earlier by Alexander R. Reinagle for an entirely different hymn.
Written for an exhibition about global mission at the height of the British Empire, the hymn has aged into something closer to its own explicit argument — a standing rebuttal to any claim that Christian fellowship stops at a national or racial border, sung today in churches on every continent it once described only as a hope.
