Editor’ s Note: Having both Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding walk through their shared experience in this groundbreaking event has been a joy for me as Editor of [ WM ]. Here is the discussion with Ben …
[ Bruce Adolph ] Ben, tell us how this First Hymn project all came about?
[ Ben Fielding ] I still remember the moment. It was an ordinary coffee, in an ordinary cafe in Sydney, but the man sitting across from me, John Dickson, was about to say something that would quietly set us off on the most incredible adventure.
He told me about a humble piece of papyrus, sitting preserved behind glass at Oxford University. On it, almost impossibly, around 80 % of the original lyrics and melody of the earliest Christian hymn ever discovered. A song that had been buried beneath the Egyptian sand for nearly two millennia, waiting to be heard again. And then John told me something that made the noise of the cafe fall almost completely away.
This hymn was already being sung around a full century before the Council of Nicaea. Before the Church had gathered to write its great creeds. Before believers had found the formal words to name what they believed, they were already singing it. A trinitarian hymn, rising from the lips of ordinary men and women, in the shadow of a world that wanted them silent.
John wanted to tell their story. He was dreaming of a documentary that would reach back through the centuries and give those ancient voices a face, a name, a place in our imagination. Like he has done so well for many years, he wanted to make history come alive. But then he told me the second part of the dream. He wanted to resurrect this hymn. To pull it from the dust of Egypt and place it back, living and breathing, into the hands of the modern Church.
I thought about what that would mean. Believers today, often divided, lifting the same words, the same melody, that our brothers and sisters lifted nearly 1800 years ago. With one song, stretching unbroken across the centuries like a thread of light.
I said yes before he even finished the sentence.
[ WM ] Once you were onboard, you then reached how to Chris. What was that conversation like?
[ Ben ] John looked at me across the table and asked who I would dream of collaborating with on something like this.
Without needing to think. I said: Chris Tomlin.
I’ ve carried a deep respect for Chris for many years, not just as one of the most gifted songwriters and worship leaders of our generation, but also as a statesman. A man who has spent his career quietly championing
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