Though Orlando Gibbons was principally employed as one of the organists to the English Chapel Royal, he is far better known today for his compositions for the English church choir. Gibbons stands in a proud and flourishing line of English church composers: a contemporary of Tomkins and Weelkes, he was preceded by the generation of Byrd and Morley, and his successors were John Blow and Pelham Humfrey, and ultimately Henry Purcell. Like his contemporaries, Gibbons wrote for the church full Services; several Verse anthems that juxtapose soloists, choirs, and often instruments; and a number of so-called "full" anthems. This genre took the place of the Latin motet as an independent sacred composition for choir alone. The best-known of his full anthems are those expansive compositions he fashioned for festive occasions, such as Hosanna to the Son of David, Lift up Your Heads, and O Clap Your Hands. No less accomplished, however, are several of his more modest four- and five-voiced anthems, including the anthem Almighty and Everlasting God, which remains a "standard" for the Anglican Church. Almighty and Everlasting God, with a text from the Anglican collect for the third Sunday after Epiphany, shows both Gibbons' contrapuntal fluency and the text-sensitivity he learned from contemporary English madrigalists. The anthem proceeds in five sections, corresponding to the breaks in text; each is articulated by a cadence, a change in texture, and a new musical motive. The opening is broadly imitative, as if to evoke the expansiveness of God's power in its counterpoint; Gibbons sets the subsequent plea that He "mercifully look upon our iniquities" to a more compact, contrapuntally more intense passage. A new and insistent point of imitation highlights the manifold nature of "all our dangers and necessities." The solidity of near-homophony evokes the security that despite the dangers, God will "stretch forth [His] right hand"; the final "through Christ our Lord" closes strongly, with an oblique reversal of the "dangers" motive.

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