Shoemaker, Helen Smith

(Mar. 16, 1903-Jan. 29, 1993). Co-founder of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer. She was born in New York City. Shoemaker was educated privately and then studied art in New York City. She was attracted to the Moral Rearmament Movement (MRA) in the 1920s in New York. She worked and resided with an MRA group at Calvary Church, New York, and there met the Rev. Sam Shoemaker. After their marriage, she sought to help her clergyman husband by a ministry of hospitality and entertaining. She was a founder of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, an international prayer movement. It was begun by small groups of people meeting in church basements and homes to pray for soldiers during World War II. It expanded in 1958 into a nationwide organization whose mission is to intercede continually for the national church and beyond, following the Anglican Cycle of Prayer. After the death of her husband, she wrote a memoir of him, I Stand By the Door: The Life of Sam Shoemaker (1967). She published a number of books on prayer including Prayer and You (1948), and The Secret Effect of Prayer (1967). She died in Brooklandville, Maryland. See Anglican Fellowship of Prayer; see Shoemaker, Samuel Moor.