Religion Media Centre annual lecture ‘The News Sphere and the Heavenly Sphere’
With Sarah Sands, CEO Hymns Ancient and Modern
St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8AU
Tuesday 29 September 2026 6.30pm
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The Religion Media Centre’s annual lecture is this year given by Sarah Sands, formerly the editor of The Sunday Telegraph, The Standard and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and now CEO of Hymns Ancient and Modern, a Christian publishing company which produces the Church Times.
Her journalism career has taken her from the Sevenoaks Chronicle to the competitive thrust of Fleet Street, covering major political ruptures at home and abroad. She was deputy editor and editor covering 9/11, the London bombings, the 2012 London Olympics, Brexit and the subsequent political upheaval.
At the BBC, editing the flagship Radio 4 Today programme from 2017 – 2020, she was variously described as having an intuitive news sense and being “quick-witted, irreverent, instinctive, energetic, mischievous and politically somewhat right of centre”.
Now she leads a company dedicated to “promoting, mainly through publishing, the advancement of religion and supporting charities and institutions connected with, or sympathetic to the ideals of, the Church of England”.
The lecture will consider “why bearing witness matters”, coincidentally taking place on the date of the Feast of Saints Michael and All Angels, which she says is “a celebration of Gabriel, who was responsible for the world’s biggest scoop” – announcing to Mary that she will give birth to Jesus, “who will be called the “Son of the Highest .. and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
She will reflect on the changing context of her journalism, from reporting wars and political ructions in the UK over the past 30 years, to a fascination with monasticism and the publication of her book in 2021 “The Interior Silence”, exploring silence, prayer, solitude and work.
More recently she has become a trustee of the British Pilgrimage Trust and plotted a pilgrimage route from King’s Lynn to Ely Cathedral in memory of her brother, Kit.
She has previously spoken of how Christianity has been unfairly marginalised in British public life with a tension between secular liberalism and religious belief. In this lecture, she will discuss how the media understands and reports the Christian perspective.
And she is dedicating this speech to Ed Stourton, a former presenter of the Today programme and the Sunday programme on Radio 4, who died this year aged 68. She said: “He was the best kind of news journalist and, unusually, theologically literate”.
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