She was born in New York City on March 16, 1903 to Howard Alexander Smith, a U.S. senator from New Jersey from 1944 to 1958, and Helen Babcock Dominick.[1]
She worked and resided with a First Century Christian Fellowship group at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York, and there met the Rev. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, (Samuel Moor Shoemaker), who was rector. 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, consisting of small groups of people meeting in church basements and homes to pray for soldiers during World War II.[1]
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).[2] She published a number of books on prayer, including Prayer and You (1948), and The Secret Effect of Prayer (1967).[3]
The family moved to Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh in 1952 and retired to a home in the Greenspring Valley of Baltimore County in 1962. Mr. Shoemaker died in 1963.[1]
In her early 70s, Mrs. Shoemaker began sculpting again. She created a series of bronze statues of Archangels, a head of Christ and several other works now owned by churches and other religious organizations.[4]
^ abcde"Helen S. Shoemaker, Author, Church Leader". Baltimore Sun. January 30, 1993. Archived from the original on July 15, 2015. Retrieved 2012-12-01. Helen Smith Shoemaker, an author, sculptor and church leader, died of a stroke Friday at Meridian Healthcare Center in Brooklandville. She was 89. ...