THE FIRST HYMN

Here is a documentary built entirely to point at God — and it does. A scrap of parchment, barely intact, holds the oldest known Christian hymn, and this film follows the effort to bring it back into the mouths of believers. Along the way it teaches real theology, real history, and real reverence for the Trinity, without a single objectionable scene to weigh against it.

It's not flawless craft. The film juggles three subjects — ancient history, biblical theology, and modern music production — and the seams show. Scenes shift focus quickly, and at times the movie feels like two documentaries stitched into one 87-minute runtime, tedious in stretches rather than tightly told.

But the content is safe for every age, and the purpose is worth honoring: reviving forgotten praise for a new generation. Watch it as a family, and let the history lesson double as a worship service.

A scrap of ancient parchment, discovered in the ruins of an Egyptian city and dated to roughly 1,800 years ago, holds the oldest Christian hymn ever found. John Dickerson, a Wheaton College professor captivated by both Scripture and music, sets out to bring it back to life. He travels to the ruins where it was first sung, then enlists two songwriters — Australian Ben Fielding and American Chris Tomlin — to help him restore the song's melody and meaning for today's church, without losing what made it sacred in the first place.

Three stars means this: a documentary with real substance and a few structural stumbles. It earns its craft points by showing rather than just telling — visiting the Egyptian ruins where the parchment surfaced, walking through the Oxford discovery in the 1800s, and taking viewers inside Nashville recording studios to demystify how a modern worship song gets made.

Where it falters is focus. The film covers ancient history, biblical theology, and music production all at once, and the constant shifting between them makes long stretches feel disjointed and tedious rather than gripping. It's the kind of ambition that would have benefited from two films instead of one.

This film exalts worship itself — the idea that praise offered to God eighteen centuries ago can still be sung today, unbroken across time. Its theology is explicit and orthodox: the song at its center speaks plainly of one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the film treats that doctrine with care rather than glossing over it. Interviews throughout dig into the culture and beliefs of the early church, giving the film real substance beneath its music-documentary surface.

There is little here to push back against. The persecution and torture the early church endured is mentioned, but only briefly, and it's treated honestly rather than gratuitously — a true cost of the faith these worshippers held. The film's ambition is simply to hand the modern church back something it lost, and by its own measure, it succeeds.

The ache underneath this whole project is one Scripture already answers: the desire to join our voices to worship that has never stopped. "One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts" (Psalm 145:4).

A film this clean, this Trinity-centered, and this eager to hand the church back a piece of its own history is easy to recommend. It stumbles in structure but never in spirit. Our answer stands: worth the trip. Gather the family, and let an 1,800-year-old song remind you how long God's people have been singing.