Sunderland's nineteenth-century expansion had filled almost every available plot of land except the area around Roker Park. When developers began moving in around 1900, the local Anglican community needed a new parish church. The Roker and Fulwell New Church Committee was formed in 1903 to raise the money. The breakthrough came from a local shipbuilder, John Priestman, who offered £6,000 in memory of his mother. The conditions he attached were precise: the church had to be completed by 31 December 1905, he was to approve the design arrangements, and he was to nominate the vicar. Priestman was a religious radical, influenced by the late-Victorian liturgical movement that emphasised the importance of the spoken word and shared communion over the older mysteries of sacrament and screen. He wanted seating for 700, no chancel screen, good acoustics, and an unobstructed view of the altar from every pew.

Edward Schroeder Prior almost could not have lost the commission. His Cambridge tutor B. F. Westcott had been Bishop of Durham until his death in 1901. Westcott's successor as bishop, Handley Moule, was an original trustee of Prior's Henry Martyn Hall in Cambridge. The Revd D. S. Boutflower, vicar of neighbouring Monkwearmouth, was a close friend of Prior's brother Charles. Prior had been a follower of William Morris and a friend of W. R. Lethaby, and he had spent years arguing for a more honest architecture rooted in materials and local craft. Three years before St Andrew's, he had written that what the architect owed the church above all was a dignified distinct building, free of trivial picturesqueness, monumental in itself. At Roker he got the chance to prove the principle.

Prior designed St Andrew's as a reinforced concrete structure faced in random-rubble masonry of local Marsden limestone. The nave is 52 feet wide and spanned by a single roof, with transverse arches that spring low from massive walls and are brought down into the church as internal buttresses. The arches are pierced at floor level to allow side passages, supported by paired columns with Saxon-pattern cushion capitals that Prior took from Lethaby's study of Hagia Sophia. The shape of the nave roof has often been compared to the upturned hull of a boat, fitting for a parish on the North Sea coast and for a benefactor who built ships. The walls are 3 feet 6 inches thick at floor level, tapering to 2 feet 6 inches at window-sill height, and the parapet runs continuously around the nave to suppress the verticality. The whole effect, from outside, is of a building rooted into the cliff: simple, massive, unornamented.

Prior populated the church with work by the Arts and Crafts circle he had spent his life among. The reredos tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi was designed by Edward Burne-Jones and woven by Morris and Co, who also made the chancel carpet. Ernest Gimson supplied the altar rails, bishop's chair, altar and processional crosses, candlesticks, pulpit, choir seats, and lectern. The foundation stone was carved by Eric Gill. Henry Payne designed the stained glass in the east window (the Ascension) and the south transept window. After Prior's death, MacDonald Gill painted the dome over the chancel to Prior's sketch scheme, showing the days of Creation. The font is a stone bowl by Randall Wells, with a wood cover by Robert Mouseman Thompson. The church was finished on 17 July 1907 and listed Grade I in 1950. A peal of ten bells was installed in 1948 as a war memorial. Iron glazing bars, made by Priestman's own shipyard, frame the windows still.