Stainer appositely described his decision to undertake the assistantship at Tenbury as ‘a turning-point in [his] life’. There were of course great musical opportunities afforded by his employment there; apart from services, he had much time for organ practice, private study and the extraordinary luxury of individual tuition from Ouseley. But the wider experience offered by the almost monastical isolation of Tenbury, a unique establishment of a college attached to a parish church, was a new kind of ecclesiastical discipline shaped by its founder's vision of church music as a quintessential and ordered component of Christian worship, rather than the tolerated appendage that it had become in so many services throughout the country. For Stainer, whose only experiences had been of political turmoil and liturgical malaise at St Paul's, Tenbury offered a quite new and deeply influential perspective that would ultimately crystallise his view of church music for the rest of his life.

St Michael's, Tenbury, had materialised after years of spiritual, emotional and physical gestation on Ouseley's part. The son of a baronet, he had been educated privately under the tutelage of a clergyman, the Rev. James Joyce, before embarking on his studies at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1843. A year later, at the age of nineteen, his father died; as the only son, he came into a substantial inheritance, a fortune which in time allowed him to realise a steadily coalescing fusion of his education and career.