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Download the 8:50 a.m. Service bulletin

Download the 10:50 a.m. Service bulletin

Bulletins are uploaded on the Friday before these Sunday services.

Sunday, October 4, 2026

by Joshua L. Mazur, Director of Music

Hymn 518: Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation

Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation is one of the oldest hymns in our hymnal. Its roots are in the Latin hymn Urbs beata Jerusalem, dating from about the seventh century. The English translation is largely the work of John Mason Neale, the nineteenth-century Anglican priest and scholar responsible for bringing many ancient Greek and Latin hymns into English-speaking worship.

The hymn begins:

Christ is made the sure foundation,

Christ the head and cornerstone,

chosen of the Lord, and precious,

binding all the Church in one.

The language comes from the New Testament's description of Christ as the cornerstone and Christians as the living stones of a spiritual house. The “building” in this hymn is ultimately the Church itself, the people of God joined together in Christ.

That helps explain the next stanza's “dedicated city” pouring out “perpetual melody.” The hymn draws upon the biblical image of the heavenly Jerusalem. Our worship here belongs to the worship of the whole Church, on earth and in heaven.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

The tune WESTMINSTER ABBEY comes from music by Henry Purcell, the great seventeenth-century English composer and organist of Westminster Abbey. Purcell did not write it for this text. His music was later adapted as a hymn tune.

So once again, the hymnbook gives us several layers of history at once: a seventh-century Latin hymn, a nineteenth-century English translation, and seventeenth-century English music. The text is in 8.7.8.7.8.7 meter, which is why it can be paired with a tune having the same metrical pattern.

The Rejected Stone

The reason for singing it this Sunday comes directly from the Gospel. Jesus quotes Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”

That makes the first stanza particularly important. The cornerstone of the Church is the rejected and crucified Christ.

Churches naturally accumulate many things that help give them identity: buildings, traditions, programs, music, friendships, and memories. All of these can be good. But none of them is the foundation. Christ is the foundation.

That is what this ancient hymn has Christians sing before we do anything else this Sunday. We enter together, identify the cornerstone, and remember what binds the Church into one.

What in the life of the Church becomes different when Christ really is the cornerstone?