THE publishing director of the SCM and Canterbury Presses, the books imprints of Hymns Ancient & Modern, the Revd Christine Smith, has announced that she’s going to retire at the top of September.
Ms Smith, who can also be accountable for Church House Publishing, joined Hymns Ancient & Modern, which publishes the Church Times, at Easter 1996. She had moved from HarperCollins, where she was editorial director.
Shortly after her arrival, the introduction of Common Worship provided the chance to provide accompanying liturgy. Working with Brother Tristram SSF, she published a series of works that included Exciting Holiness, Celebrating the Seasons, and a processional Gospel book. These led to liturgical works for other denominations.
Under her supervision, the Canterbury Press imprint was revitalised, attracting authors comparable to Barbara Brown Taylor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Sara Miles, and introducing them to a UK readership. She exercised her editorial freedom, bringing the gay US bishop the Rt Revd Gene Robinson on a UK book tour, when he was not permitted to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference and was forbidden to evangelise.
The SCM Press was brought under her supervision, and, later, the Saint Andrew Press, the imprint of the Church of Scotland. Then, in 2009, she was entrusted with the management of Church House Publishing, the Church of England’s official imprint. She will proceed to oversee this after her retirement from the Canterbury Press.
She admits to spending 20 years saying that religious poetry wouldn’t sell. “Malcolm Guite’s Sounding the Seasons and Mark Oakley’s Splash of Words — which won the Michael Ramsey Prize — modified all that,” she says. “Now it’s considered one of our prime categories.”
Besides taking over — and turning round — the loss-making Church House Publishing, she accepted the duty of hymn-book publishing, which employed her negotiating skills to the total, given the strongly held views that contributors had over the smallest detail. In her time, essential latest hymn books have appeared for the Methodist Church, the Church of Ireland, and the Church of Scotland. Most recently, The Revised English Hymnal has appeared, after seven years in preparation.
In addition to this, she found time to coach for ordination. During this era, she discovered that there was no single department or full-time tutor of homiletics in any theological institution within the UK. In 2014, she attended the US Festival of Homiletics, and was inspired to launch the sell-out Church Times Festival of Preaching three years later. Thousands have since participated in online and in-person events, and considered one of her last acts will probably be to attend the following festival that she has organised, in Cambridge (15-17 September).
She says that she stays passionate about the Church today: “The ingenuity, intellect, and imagination of certain voices are an antidote to the anxiety about church decline and the reasonably flat and uninspiring approaches which might be being proposed to reverse it. Encountering truth and sweetness within the written and spoken word is transformative.”
It has been a privilege, she says, to work closely with people comparable to Esther de Waal, Dr Paula Gooder, Canon Sam Wells, and others at St Martin-in-the-Fields, and the impressive array of contributors to Reflections for Daily Prayer. “It gives you enormous hope for the longer term of the Church.”
She will probably be succeeded by her colleague David Shervington, who has managed the SCM Press since 2016, first as senior commissioning editor and latterly as associate publisher.
Two of his titles, Ghost Ship, by A. D. A. France Williams, and The Dark Womb, by Karen O’Donnell, were longlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize. He was the founding father of Theology Slam for young theologians. He is a licensed lay minister in Guildford diocese.
