ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS stands on the corner of Trafalgar Square in the centre of London. It welcomes around a million visitors a year. It hosts ticketed concerts, and there are six or seven sung services each week.

Samuel Wells, Vicar of St Martin’s, noticed that the miscellaneous events being offered on Thursday evenings were not well attended. Remembering a Sunday programme, Great Sacred Music, that he had heard on a North Carolina radio station, he wondered whether inviting people into St Martin’s to listen to music and engage with it might be an idea. This book is an account of what happened next and the success of “Great Sacred Music” in St Martin’s and many other churches.

Here is mission and outreach through music. Everybody is welcome, people of faith or not. What Wells and his director of music, Andrew Earis, came up with is an event, not a service, with a structure in which great choral music is performed (live or on disc) in a mix of information about the pieces and also including hymns.

The pattern flows like this: first, there is an anthem (no chat before that), and that is followed by a welcome, a theological overview of the theme for that evening, and an introduction to the first hymn and information about the writer and composer. Next, we listen to three pieces of choral music, each again introduced with information about them. These are examples of great sacred music. Another hymn and a choir item round the evening off.

Great Sacred Music offers 50 themed evenings, grouped under categories: seasons, hymn-writers, saints, occasions, choral works, hope, and faith. The publishers of the hymns and anthems are given, and the music ranges from plainsong to the present. Of course, St Martin’s has its own St Martin’s Voices, who were willingly embraced by this initiative, and there is an acknowledgement that there is a cost involved if you have live music and if you want an organist for the hymns.

There is no preaching as such: just the invitation to come with open ears to listen. Each week, two hundred people attend St Martin’s with around 20,000 followers online. The project has been taken up both here and in the United States.

The Revd Ronald Corp, an assistant priest of St Alban’s, Holborn, in London, is a composer and conductor.

Great Sacred Music: A resource book for mission through music
Samuel Wells and Andrew Earis
Canterbury Press £18.99
(978-1-78622-573-3)
Church Times Bookshop £15.19