Historian John Dickson takes worship leaders inside The First Hymn Project, the quest to resurrect the earliest known Christian hymn with surviving musical notation, preserved on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1786. We’ll trace the hymn’s journey from its discovery in Egypt through scholarly work at Oxford, and see how historians and musicians collaborated to bring its ancient melody back to life. We’ll consider what this 1,800-year-old song reveals about early Christian worship and how those insights can shape our songwriting, liturgy, and congregational practice today.
