Martin Smith, frontman for the band Delirious? and his wife Anna were proud new parents for the sixth time when Challenge spoke to Martin about their other ‘new baby’ Compassionart. Now a little further down the track we catch up with story. The idea for Compassionart is simple. Songwriters receive royalties for their work. Why not write some songs that people will love to sing and donate the royalties to help support projects for some of the poorest people in the world?

Martin got out his contact book and spoke to some of today’s most influential Christian songwriters. Together these songwriters account for at least 42 million albums sold, 82 No. 1 songs, 10 GRAMMY Awards, 110 Dove Awards, two Stellar Awards, two American Music Awards, and 98 current Top 500 songs sung by millions in churches around the world. Not only did they agree to get together to write the songs but also to donate the royalties. And their publishers, managers, copyright institutes and agents involved waived their rights too! The monies will be split between an agreed charity project and the individual artists' chosen charities.

‘Everyone has their individual choices,’ says Martin. ‘For Darlene Zschech it’s Hope Rwanda; for Graham Kendrick, Compassion UK, Steve Curtis Chapman has his own charity that works out of China adopting Chinese orphans.’ How long has this project been gestating?

‘I remember chatting to someone last December 06 just before our Christmas concert. I said “OK let’s go for it”. I emailed all those people and said “why don’t we spend the week together writing songs?” and amazingly after a bit of juggling about, everybody came back and said “we’d love to”! It’s been a small miracle to be honest.’ Did they put in a lot of preparation, do you think?

‘I’m not sure realistically they’ve been thinking and praying about it for a full year. ‘We’ll arrive in Scotland in January (08) and everyone will be full on – writing songs together. Let’s see what opens up here; let’s see what God has to say and I think the electricity will start.

‘When we’re all sitting round the table my hope is that we can dream something up together that all of us can get involved in and spearhead something. ‘We want to get these songs earning money so we can pool it and get it into these projects. And maybe even deeper than that, there’ll be 12 people in that room for a week so who knows what will come out of that in terms of relationships.

‘It’s a great time and everyone is excited. It feels like, for want of a Christian word, a “Kingdom thing”. Everyone is laying down their own agenda for the week so it’s miraculous.’ ‘The aim certainly will be that this results in a Compassionart record (due out in the autumn). But one step at a time. We’ll also produce a coffee table book of the week. We’ll photograph the whole thing and get a documentary out of that.’ And that’s exactly what they did. They went to Scotland in January. Twenty two songs came out of the week. A great time was had by all.

In February, those who could, went to the famous Abbey Road Studios in London to record tracks for the album. At the Dove Award Ceremony in Nashville, Compassionart songwriters debut the first of what they hope will be a succession of popular songs. And those songs will earn money for the poorest of the poor.

You can’t ask for fairer than that!

• For information about the Compassionart initiative see www.compassionart.co.uk