Head of the Church, our risen Lord

Head of the church, our risen Lord. Josiah Conder* (1789-1855). First published in The Congregational Hymn Book (1836), edited by Conder for the new Congregational Church as a Supplement to Isaac Watts*’s Psalms and Hymns. It is based on a hymn from the Gelasian Sacramentary, an 8th-century Vatican manuscript in which the Feasts of the Church were arranged according to the ecclesiastical year. The Sacramentary contained the priest’s prayers and rubrics for the Eucharist, and the Gelasian Sacramentary was attributed to Gelasius (Pope, 492-496). This particular prayer was translated by Thomas Cranmer for his Prayer Book of 1549, and adapted for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as the Second...