The past few months have been a busy time to be a Government Minister at the Treasury. Barack Obama’s in-tray upon taking office in the USA is also daunting: a global financial crisis, a renewed conflict in the Middle East, and the urgent need for action on climate change. And, in the borough I represent as one of the MPs, a young man was stabbed to death a few weeks ago after leaving a church hall party.

It would be easy to lapse into cynicism or even despair at the scale of the challenges that face us as a society. But it is the calling of politicians like me to identify solutions and to implement them. Even more than that, I believe that politicians of the left have a particular calling to be hopeful – to not settle for the world that is, but to work for something better.

Last month, in a speech I delivered to the Institute for Public Policy Research, I argued that politics must be based firmly on hope – the sort of hope that imagines a better world and works tirelessly to make it a reality. I argued that churches and other faith-based organisations are ideal allies for this work.

I have been a Christian since my mid-teens and have always found what the Bible says about hope to be particularly inspiring. At the beginning of his first letter, the apostle Peter writes that God “has given us new birth into a living hope”. Likewise, Paul wrote to the Romans about the “hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay”.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described Christians as “prisoners of hope”. The hope he is referring to is exactly the sort of hope we need in politics: a down to earth, roll your sleeves up kind of hope.

It’s what Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, meant when he wrote: “People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present”.

And it’s what Pope Benedict was referring to in his second encyclical, written on the theme of hope: “It is not merely a projection of what we would like to be or do. It leads us to discover seeds of a new world already present today”.

Last year I was a patron for Hope 2008, a national programme in which hundreds of churches helped their communities: garden clearing and litter removal; a rehabilitation project for homeless men in Manchester based on playing football with them; volunteers running a café in Bridgend working to help youngsters to avoid drugs. The Prime Minister hosted a reception at

A few weeks ago I joined a group of Street Pastors in Stratford at 10pm on a Saturday night. I was there for an hour – but they were out all night.  They put it to me like this: “Street Pastors takes practical hope to the pavement”.

Politics of the left has always had an uneasy relationship with the status quo. Many of us got involved because we were determined to challenge injustice and to work for a better world. We can learn a lot from projects like these. I am convinced that by working with them, we really can make the world a better place.

The Labour Party has sometimes appeared very uneasy dealing with faith. But something important is happening on the left of politics. Faith, often derided as conservative or irrelevant or heading for extinction, is providing more of our moral leadership – just as it did in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

It is no coincidence that the last three leaders of the Labour Party have been people whose politics has been defined by their Christian faith. Nor is it a coincidence that Australia now has a Labour Prime Minister who also sees faith as the starting point of his political engagement. Nor that the United States now has a Democratic President who learned his politics as a community organiser for a group of churches in Chicago.

Here in the UK, the Labour Government has been increasingly open to the influence of churches and other faith groups, for example, in “welfare to work”. Much of the inspiration for the New Deal was drawn from the churches’ report on Unemployment and the Future of Work, which set out the moral case for getting people into work. Many New Deal contributions have come from churches and other faith communities, and I hope this role will be extended even further.

There is a similar story in tackling global poverty. In 2005, the UK Government was able to push for crucial decisions on development aid and debt relief because of the massive support from campaigns like Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History. Around 80% of the activist supporters for these campaigns were from the churches. Later this year we will be underlining the importance of meeting the Millennium Development Goals when the G20 meeting comes to London.

In these areas of policy – and others – we face big challenges. But our job as politicians is to develop solutions, offering honest and realistic hope to people experiencing anxiety or worse. By working with churches and other faith-based projects we can succeed in building a new sort of politics – one not riddled with cynicism, but grounded firmly in hope.

Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP is Financial Secretary to the Treasury, MP for East Ham and Labour Party Vice Chair for Faith Groups.