Between the 1740s and 1750s, a stream of German-speaking settlers, called Pennsylvania Dutch from the misheard 'Deutsch', migrated south from Pennsylvania into the Piedmont of North Carolina. Some were Lutheran, some were Reformed, and they often shared meeting houses in those early years before they could afford separate buildings. The Reformed group that became Grace Church was first known as the 'Calvin or Presbyterian Congregation on Second Creek in the Dutch Settlement.' They worshipped in an early structure called the Hickory Church, built sometime in the mid-1750s on Jacob Fulenwiler's plantation. When Fulenwiler died in 1771, the two congregations split: the Lutherans moved to what became Organ Lutheran Church in 1774, and the Reformed congregation moved to the site where Grace Lower Stone Church now stands.

The earliest documented evidence of the present site is a deed dated February 1774, in which Lorentz Lingel conveyed sixteen acres from a larger 1761 Granville Land Grant to Andrew Holshouser and John Lippard. The transfer was 'for the use of the Calvin congregation adjacent or belonging to the Meeting House on the following land,' which means a log meeting house was already standing there before the paperwork was signed. The Earl of Granville's land grants covered the upper half of colonial North Carolina, and they brought systematic legal title to a region that had been settled informally for decades. Grace's deed sits at the intersection of an old-world religious tradition and a new-world property regime, both of them about to be transformed by a Revolution that was eighteen months away.

Construction on the present granite building began after the neighboring Organ Lutheran congregation started theirs in 1792. Grace was completed in 1795. The walls are massive: a 12-foot gable roof rises over a building 51 feet long and 40 feet 9 inches wide, with walls 27 feet high. The architecture is Georgian colonial, similar to stone churches in the German parts of Pennsylvania from which the congregation had migrated. The original floor was made of smooth stones laid directly on the ground and remained in place until 1871. The pulpit was wine-glass shaped, mounted on a pedestal with winding stairs and a sounding board overhead, in the Reformed tradition of taking the spoken word seriously. Three galleries ran along the walls for additional seating; the partitions were eventually removed, and the galleries now look much as they would have in the early years.

The cemetery beside the church is a directory of central piedmont German surnames. Among the older markers are Barringer, Beaver, Berger, Boger, Bost, Brown, Casper, Corl, Fisher, Foil, Holshouser, Isenhower, Klutts, Lingle, Lippard, Lyerly, Miller, Misenheimer, Moose, Peeler, Rinehart, Roseman, Shuping, Trexler, Troutman, Weaver, and Yost. Many descendants of these early families still attend the church. The German inscriptions over the doorways and that 1795 clock-face tablet on the south wall are still legible to anyone who can read the language. The dedication of the building itself was delayed until November 1811, during the pastorate of Reverend George Boger, when Reverend Andrew Loretz preached the sermon and Reverend Dr. John Robinson of Poplar Tent Presbyterian Church participated in the service.

Grace Church was an early founder of the United Church of Christ, formed in 1957 by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church with the Congregational Christian Churches. In 2005, after a doctrinal dispute, the congregation pulled out of the UCC and aligned itself with the Evangelical Association, a smaller body closer to its earlier Reformed roots. The bell tower was added to the roof in 1901; the interior galleries were renovated in 1937 to provide Sunday School classrooms, then later restored to something closer to the original layout. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The local nickname, Lower Stone Church, distinguishes it from Organ Lutheran Church up the hill. Both buildings, raised by neighboring congregations in the same decade from the same local granite, still stand a short distance apart in the Rowan County countryside.