Timothy Dudley-Smith, who wrote “Tell Out My Soul” and more than other 400 hymns and served as Bishop of Thetford in the Church of England from 1981 to 1992, died August 12 at 97.
Dudley-Smith wrote the texts for his hymns but not the music. “I can’t read music and I’m totally unmusical,” Dudley-Smith told Canon Herbert Taylor early in his vocation as a priest, but Taylor included his text for “Tell Out My Soul” in the Anglican Hymn Book in 1965.
“Everyone knows Tell out my soul (May 1961) and Lord, for the years (February 1967) but, after those …?” Canon Michael Saward, a fellow hymn-writer, wrote in 2006. “Yet, of all today’s hymn-writers, he is probably alone in producing the highest percentage of Rolls Royce texts and a very small scrap-yard of old bangers.”
He was born in 1926. Dudley-Smith’s father was a schoolmaster, and he died when his son was 11.
Dudley-Smith was a leading figure among evangelicals in the Church of England. He became editor of Crusade magazine, created in 1954 after a Billy Graham crusade in London. He was a long-standing friend of John R.W. Stott’s, and wrote a two-volume biography of Stott. He preached at Stott’s funeral. Church Times reported that John Betjeman described “Tell Out My Soul” as “one of the few modern hymns that will truly last.”
He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2003 for his “services to hymnody.” Among his many other books was Snakes and Ladders: A Hymn Writer’s Reflections (The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2009). His final book was A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer (Oxford).
Douglas LeBlanc is an Associate Editor and writes about Christianity and culture. He and his wife, Monica, attend St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Henrico, Virginia.
