Pastors won’t preach, meeting hears ahead of street scheme launch
REASSURANCES have been given that street pastors are not there to preach as the scheme gets set to launch in Lerwick later this month.
Instead, street pastors aim to offer a non-judgemental approach to helping people on a night out.
Members of Lerwick Community Council received an update on the scheme at a meeting on Monday evening.
A commissioning service event will take place at the Lerwick Baptist Church on 28 November at 7.30pm, with pastors then heading out to the streets after.
Street pastors are volunteers from Christian churches who are deployed with a “listening, caring and helping” ethos, usually at weekends when people are on a night out.
There are street pastors across the country, with the organisation Ascension Trust for example overseeing schemes in cities as well as more rural areas including Kirkwall and Stornoway.
The idea of running a similar scheme in Lerwick first reared its head publicly last year.
An update given to Lerwick Community Council at its latest meeting last night said 11 volunteers from a variety of churches are involved in the scheme so far, with more expected to come on board next year.
Shetland Islands Council’s antisocial behaviour coordinator Billy Mycock, who has been involved in the project to get it up and running, said Shetland Street Pastors has launched as a registered charity, licensed by Ascension Trust Scotland.
He said a key focus has been on trying to keep the project sustainable, given town pastors have been tried in Lerwick twice before but was stopped.
Mycock said it had taken around two years to get to the point where the Lerwick street pastors scheme is ready to go live.
A group of seven street pastors, one coordinator and one prayer pastor will focus initially on monthly patrols on “payday weekends” – usually from 10pm on Saturdays to 3am/4am on Sundays.
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If more volunteers are recruited then there should be more regular patrols, Mycock said.
Each volunteer has already done two supervised patrols as part of their training.
Bev Womersley from the Salvation Army also told the community council that the street pastor role is about “caring, listening and helping”.
“It might be just listening to someone – they might have had a bad day and they just want to offload,” she said.
“It might be that somebody is waiting for a taxi and they’re waiting on their own, and to some people, that can make them feel vulnerable.
“It might be that some people have misplaced their phone or their friends.”
Womersley said she had previously worked as a street pastor in Wales and said people feel reassured when they are there.
“We are not authoritative – we’re not the police, we’re not an emergency service. We’re there purely to help.”
They might give out items like gloves, hats, water and lollipops – with the latter said to be a helpful tool to defuse tense situations.
Womersley also said that during a training patrol in Lerwick someone said they “felt safe” knowing street pastors were present.
She said the street pastors have been working closely with other agencies and organisations, including the police, emergency services and the OPEN youth charity.
It was the police, the meeting heard, that first raised the idea of a street pastors scheme in Lerwick.
Community councillor Brian Smith questioned the use of the term ‘pastors’ in the name, saying religious connotations could be a “hurdle” to folk buying into the scheme.
When he was informed that street pastors are not there to preach, Smith said: “I think if this isn’t a religious group going out there to preach, I think that’s something that would be good to advertise to people, just to make that clear.”
Meanwhile the meeting heard that there may be discussions about the idea of the local street pastors undergoing training for using naloxone, the medication which reverses overdoses.
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