Malcolm Brown

Building heaven on earth

Taking 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' as his starting point and inspiration, Malcolm Brown, the Church of England's Director of Mission and Public Affairs (MPA), has a clear understanding of what his department is there to do.

'We're about equipping Christians to live faithfully; we're about encouraging them to share the Gospel that they've got; we're about relations as a Church and as a people with those beyond the faith, whether secular or people of other faiths,' he says, adding that MPA is 'working with all sorts of people, in the Church, beyond the Church, with Parliament, with Government, with other bodies in civil society, through legislation, through consultations, to try to work out how we can make this world just that little bit closer to the Kingdom in all sorts of detailed ways'.

Containing experts on medical ethics, science, international affairs, evangelism and hospital chaplaincy, the MPA team has recently put a lot of work into suggesting amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

'We made a major submission to the consultative process on that,' Malcolm says, offering an example of the type of work undertaken in MPA, 'trying to argue from a Christian position what we actually believe about embryo research - what we believe about being human first of all, and what that implies for the way in which we as a whole society treat the human embryo, the human cell, the human person.'

In addition to briefing bishops in the House of Lords on the subject, MPA is working with other groups who are adopting a similar stance, to amend the legislation to get it to a point where the Church can comfortably give the bill its backing - fully aware that sometimes change flows in the same direction as God's will, and sometimes it definitely doesn't.

A former parish priest who caught a vision in the 1980s for giving social action more of a theological backbone, Malcolm feels very strongly that working out God's will involves combining Christian ethics with academic thought: 'There's a major question about how we enable Christians to discern the will of God, always humbly, always tentatively knowing that God maybe has different agendas to us, but we must use our brains, we must use the knowledge available to us and work with that, with the Gospel, with the thrust of what we believe about God and being human - to help the world to be faithful.'

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