Dearmer, with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, helped revive and spread traditional and medieval English musical forms.

His ideas on patterns of worship have been linked to the Arts and Crafts Movement, while The English Hymnal reflects both folkloric scholarship and Christian Socialism.

Such adherence to the letter was considered necessary in an environment in which conservatives such as John Kensit had been leading demonstrations, interruptions of services and legal battles against practices of Ritualism and sacerdotalism, both of which they saw as "popery".

Dearmer states in the introduction that his goal is to help in "remedying the lamentable confusion, lawlessness, and vulgarity which are conspicuous in the Church at this time".

[13] His ideas on the pattern and manner of worship have been linked to the influence of John Ruskin, William Morris and others in the Arts and Crafts movement.

In 1912, Dearmer was instrumental in founding the Warham Guild,[15] a sort of practical expression of the concerns discussed in the Alcuin Club and reflected in The Parson's Handbook, to carry out "the making of all the 'Ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof' according to the standard of the Ornaments Rubric, and under fair conditions of labour".

[7] In 1931 an enlarged edition of Songs of Praise was published,[17] notable for the first[18] publication of the hymn "Morning Has Broken",[17] commissioned by Dearmer from noted children's author Eleanor Farjeon.

[19] Dearmer left St Mary's to serve as a chaplain to the British Red Cross ambulance unit in Serbia, where his wife died of typhus in 1915.

For fifteen years Dearmer served in no official ecclesiastical posts, preferring instead to focus on his writing, volunteerism and effecting social change.