The Street Pastors initiative has grown dramatically since its birth in London 12 years ago, when the Church began to establish new forms of contact with hard-to-reach communities of young or disenfranchised people in urban centres.
Street pastors in Bexhill, Sussex, have completed a Response Pastors training day and will form the first Response Pastors team outside of London – Bexhill Response Pastors. The volunteers have received their uniforms and certificates and were commissioned as Response Pastors at a service last week.
Many new Street Pastors volunteers started training back in February, so by May many of them will have reached the stage at which they can be ‘commissioned’ – made ready to be an official street pastor.
Have you heard this one before?
How many animals of each species did Moses take into the ark?
Session: Practical assignment – a night out as an observer with one of my local teams
This was an eye-opening session, which while it didn’t exactly turn my assumptions about homeless people upside down, did begin the process of making me better informed about the local rough sleeping scene and the available services.
Who: Members of the management team, local administrator, coordinator and trainees.
Key messages of the session: What SPs don’t do (knowing the boundaries) is as important as what they do do.
Who was there: Ascension Trust Representative (the trainer for the day), members of the management team, local administrator, a few existing SPs who popped in to say hello, and 12 new trainees from 11 different local churches.
The Street Pastors training course presents the ethos of the Street Pastors initiative, and contains resources to prepare teams for appropriate and relevant relationships on the streets. It aims to bring together the challenges of a Christian responsibility for our neighbourhoods with the specialised knowledge vital to participation in 21st-century culture.
What does springtime mean to you? Blossom? Daffodils? Lambs? Cleaning? Spring is all about the promise of growth, warmth and colour.
