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Issue
5 – December 2011 |
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Welcome to our latest newsletter reflecting on another
successful year of Street Pastors in |
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Review of the Year By Tony Lees Our fourth year of operation began with training our
third wave of street volunteers between January and May. We commissioned them
at We have also been busy linking
up with other towns in the region to ensure we take advantage of training and
‘best practice’ in the region. Recently we have been working with members of
our street team who are setting up new groups in Witham and Billericay. When
they move on, we will miss their support and fellowship, but wish them well
with the new initiatives. |
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The day the Sheriff came to town! One of the highlights of the
year was an invitation to the Mayor’s parlour at the Civic Centre to talk with
the High Sheriff of Essex about our work in the town, and our part in
Chelmsford being given the first ‘Safe Community’ award in the UK. In fact,
the High Sheriff said she would like to join us on the streets one night as
an ‘observer’.
Carol Carol Kellingray, who has been
a key part of our team since the idea of Chelmsford Street Pastors was
formed, has decided to retire from her many roles as Care Team leader,
training co-ordinator and steering team member. Carol has made an immense
contribution since 2006 when we began the planning phase. Fortunately she
will continue on the street team as a Team Leader. Carol, we all thank you for your huge contribution to the team. We will
miss your calm efficiency in all the areas you have led. AGM We are having an AGM on 3
December as we are now a registered charity in our own right and we hope as
many possible will join us for that as it will also be our pre-Christmas
fellowship morning, where we will add new volunteers to the steering team to
replace retirees. Finally, I would like to thank all our volunteers for
another year of dedicated support to the work we believe God calls us to,
week by week, in the town. Everybody knows that Blessings to you all, Tony Lees |
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The August 2011 Riots A Wake-up Call for Prayerful
Evangelism By High Dibbens During 2011 the world has witnessed two kinds of street violence. In |
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The contrast between
Does the Church have a response? Mary Douglas and
other anthropologists write about the ‘grids’ which provide the
structures/culture of society. Some
countries or groups have ‘strong grids’ where the values and social norms are widely recognised or enforced. In
such societies there is usually great stability until such time when
oppressed people collectively decide that they can tolerate it no longer and
rise up in protest against their oppressors. It would seem that events
in North Africa and the On the other hand, societies which
have weak grids where values and norms are no longer agreed and authority is
no longer respected can easily descend into chaos. This is surely what we
witnessed in the During the last 60
years, the grid of our society in the So is it not time
to ‘understand the present time, and wake from our slumber… to put on the
armour of light… and clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ’? – Romans
13 v 11–14. Deep and whole-hearted commitment to prayerful evangelism is
surely the need of the hour throughout God’s Church in the Hugh Dibbens Adviser in Evangelism Barking Area 12 August 2011 |
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Responses to the August Riots from the Bishop of
Barking Thank you to all of you who
have responded in numerous ways during this past fortnight of riots and their
aftermath. Although the Barking area has been spared the worst examples of
rioting and looting, where it has
happened it has been devastating to those who have been injured and
experienced damage to their businesses. As well as being shocking,
the events of this past fortnight have also been inspiring and heart-warming.
I refer to the instinctive response of the majority of the population
who have demonstrated kindness, generosity and voluntary service to their
stricken communities. It has been evident that in many cases our Church and
faith communities have been at the forefront of this neighbourliness. One
example has been the Welcome Centre at St Mary’s Walthamstow which opened two
hours after a request from our local MP and has provided a café and respite
centre for Waltham Forest Police for the past week. This follows the closure
of police canteens in the borough because of cuts. At its peak the centre
served 240 meals in an evening and provided overnight accommodation for
police on long shifts. Ironically the initiative was organised on Twitter and
brought volunteers from all over There are of many
underlying causes for the behaviour we have witnessed, not least the
escalating gap between the rich and the poor, which successive governments
have been unable or unwilling to address. However, it is important
for the Church to identify some of the particular causes which we can address. The riots, and the public
outrage they have caused, provide our churches with a greater opportunity
than ever to do what we do well. Prayer Prayer vigils, walks and
events have to be the bedrock of all our reflection and social action. To
that end, there was a National Leaders’ Prayer Summit at Wembley on 17
September. Male Role Models There is a growing need to raise
a generation of Christian male role models who see it as their vocation to
mentor young people and demonstrate an alternative lifestyle to the one they
have chosen or has been chosen for them. The majority of those
caught up in the riots were teenage boys and young men. Many are likely to be
from the 25% of young people growing up in families where a father figure is
absent. They will have had few male role models in primary school, and their
GP and psychologist are likely to be female. The church is the largest
provider of youth services in the country in spite of losing one million
young people from our churches during the Decade of Evangelism. We have
a responsibility to care for and encourage our youth workers both paid and
voluntary and to foster a vocation among young men to consider becoming
school mentors, Street Pastors, politicians, teachers or youth and community
workers. We have the opportunity to demonstrate an alternative to a society
which has become defined and consumed by consumerism. Is it surprising that
young people have gone on a looting spree when they are out of work and
unable to buy what the rich buy without noticing the cost? What makes human
beings distinct from the rest of creation is that we have a built in need for
purpose, meaning and self-worth. Without A faith in Jesus Christ
provides purpose, meaning and self-worth, and a church community can nurture Morals and Values Once we have a sense of
purpose, meaning and self-worth, living by a set of moral values becomes a
natural way of life. Without them morality makes little sense and is
therefore difficult to cultivate. This is why evangelism needs to precede
morality. When young people see the very people who they
should look up to ‘on the make’ is it any wonder that they have
followed suit. They watch bankers continuing to be paid huge bonuses, MPs
claiming made-up expenses and police being paid by newspapers. They
see hands grabbing all they can among the respected institutions of
society. It is not surprising that, given half a chance, they will grab too. Of
course the Church is not unscathed, either, where there are examples of the
grabbing hands of child abuse. Distinctive Responses All this reinforces for me
the need for our churches to seize the opportunity and make the distinctive
responses that are the core values of the gospel: ·
To pray for all
those affected by the riots – the victims and the perpetrators ·
To raise up
role models – especially young men ·
To support our
youth workers ·
To nurture the
vocation of young men ·
To evangelise
through mentoring, friendship and example ·
To show people
that purpose, meaning and self-worth is priceless – because it cannot be
bought ·
To provide
courses on parenting and marriage support
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Philly’s
Diary By Phil Couch Ivor approached
me some time back to ask if I would contribute a column about some of the
encounters I've witnessed. I've kept a diary of several of them ever since
the beginning of Street Pastors. I’ve
found that God is always there with us and reminds us of that fact
constantly, as * Note –
The names have been changed to protect people’s identities |
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In this edition, I’m reliving a
few street encounters from a couple of years back. We’ve had many more, of course,
during 2011, but Omar & Ellie Walking along the river walk past Lloyds at
11.45pm I happened to say good evening to a young man, picked at random from the
crowd. He answered, but as he did so he tripped over the metal bucket the bar
had put outside for the smokers to put their cigarette butts in. I checked he was ok and he talked about how he
wasn’t really drunk but how, once, his drink was spiked and he went on at
length about that experience. He was 20 and I said my children were a similar
age and we discussed the problems of spiking in town bars. It all seemed
pretty inconsequential until I asked if he was having a good evening. The young man, Omar, said he was out with his
fiancé. They had found out only that day that she had miscarried the child
she was carrying. She was three months through her term and they just wanted
to try and forget about it for a couple of hours. The girl, Ellie, came over and I asked if it
would be ok if we prayed for them. Omar said that although he wasn’t brought
up in any faith – he was half Turkish, in fact – he had been praying every
day since Ellie had been feeling unwell. I brought Ursula over and she chatted with the
couple for a while. Ellie was getting visibly upset talking about it. I
repeated the question about prayer, suggesting that they may be more
comfortable about us praying for them back at base. Ellie said she would like
us to pray with them right then and there. Omar was comfortable with that, so
with the heavy beat of Edwards and Lloyds bellowing out, surrounded by
drunken revellers, we four all stood and prayed, apparently invisible to all
as there were no interruptions or calling out. It was a real ‘moment’ and one that chokes me up
even now as they were such a lovely young couple. Not only was there a
physical need to be prayed for, but Omar clearly has some semblance of
belief. God bless them both. Ursula emailed the following week to say: Hi Street Pastors and Prayer Team,
Neil This was a surreal experience and shows the
pragmatic approach that street pastors have. Townlink radioed for the pastors to go to a drunk on a
bench outside the Saracen’s Head at the top of the High Street. We found
Neil, who was celebrating his 18th birthday with some friends. They’d come
from Poor Neil couldn’t even sit up, let alone stand
and a pastor held his head as he threw up again and again. The only taxis
that take drunks are the black cabs as they can be hosed out if there’s any
‘misfortune’ in the back of them. So we had to get Neil to the Pizza Express
end of town to the cab rank. Neil still couldn’t sit up. This was going to be
a long night. While we waited for Neil, two of his mates
started arguing about a girl. They were swearing, pushing and squaring up,
and although no blows were thrown, the amount they had drunk could have led
to violence as neither would back down. A pastor intervened to calm things
down as Neil carried on throwing up. It’s here that I ought to mention the fancy-dress
football match that was being played in the High Street! About twenty people
dressed as 70s footballers with Kevin Keegan-style perm wigs, Adam Ant (x2),
Slash from Guns n’ Roses, Superman, Supergirl, an
80s DJ with a huge mullet wig, not to mention a guy wearing a Ronald Reagan
rubber mask, but pushed up so it looked like he had two faces, all wellied a ball around yelling “FOOTEEEE!!”
with every kick. We spent an hour with puking Neil, his two mates
squaring up (complete with the obligatory bloke in the middle going “Calm down,
calm down.”) and the LSD XI football team. It was very odd. What happened? Well, foot police confiscated
Superman’s ball and Neil’s mates walked him slowly down to the taxi rank with
us following. He had become coherent enough to say to us things like, “I can
see!”, and to Janet Halstead who had held his head while he retched, “I
recognise your voice!” He kept shaking our hands and thanking us. His mates
reckoned we were all “brilliant”. We thought it was a job well done, with
free surreal entertainment thrown in. The experience prepared us for Dukes later that
morning, where a man on a stag night was stripped in the car park of his last
vestige of modesty – his pants! It was a very interesting night. |
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Funny
Comments And finally, a couple of years
ago as Christmas was approaching, I became a bit concerned about the quality
of religious knowledge in Chelmsford when the following was shouted at us by
a drunken and hopelessly misinformed reveller, who obviously wanted to upset
us: “Hey Christian, I’ve got news
for you… Father Christmas doesn’t exist!” |
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___ “Preach the
gospel wherever possible. Use words when necessary” – St Francis of |
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Street Pastors in the media
Christianity Magazine
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V-FESTIVAL 2011 By
Hugh Dibbens Amid the thousands of festival-goers
and world-famous entertainers is the God Tent, welcoming any who want to
chill out, have a drink, or shelter from the rain! Planted at ‘V’ from the
beginning and there at every festival since, the God Tent is a centre of
Christian witness where Street Pastors get an especially warm welcome. The
God Tent team also generously arranged for ‘Staff Passes’ for Street Pastors
on duty at ‘V’. |
LES ISAAC’S BOOK: Just seven
years ago, a small group of faith-filled Christians took to the crime-ridden
streets of Brixton in More projects
are starting all the time, and enquiries come from all over the world,
because of course |
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This year there was a focus on
testing out the SP ministry on the camp sites. Thousands of small tents,
cheek by jowl, with thousands of people living in them for the weekend.
People were open to meet Street Pastors but the initiative was very much with
the SPs rather than the punters. There were some good chats when
it was possible to share Jesus and the atmosphere was more positive than we
are used to at night in One area of opportunity for
evangelism is with the huge numbers of staff recruited to sell programmes (at
£10 each!), clean up the rubbish and provide security. In terms of offering practical
help – the car parks are some distance from the camp sites and |
Available from
November from Amazon or from Ascension Trust – phone 0207 771 9770 for
details. |
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ROWAN
WILLIAMS SUGGESTS LEADERS SHOULD DO SOME STREET PASTORING |
EMAIL! From: Tom and Ann Hi Ivor We had a good night on Saturday - apart from three
male fights, one female fight, two drunk females, two vomiting young males,
one young female who had lost her friends, her money and her composure, plus
finally a drunk female hit over the head and having an epileptic fit. All in
the space of the last hour and a half. Quite a normal night really! Tom. From: Ivor And that was just at the base! Ivor |
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"What about having a new
law that made all Cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors
of national papers and the hundred most successful financiers in the UK
spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a
council estate?
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Don't forget, if you're away
from home and you can't remember whether or not you're on duty at the
weekend, you can simply go to a PC anywhere in the world and check our
website at: |
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www.chelmsfordstreetpastors.org |
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House of Lords shoutout! The
Minister of State for Crime and Anti-social Behaviour Reduction commended the
work of Street Pastors when she spoke in the House of Lords. In
response to a question from Lord Bishop of Chester, the Right Rev Peter
Forster, Baroness Browning said she was familiar with the work of the
church-based Street Pastor groups, who help people in trouble – many under
the influence of alcohol or drugs – in town and city centres late at night. She
added that she would 'need to dig deeper than looking to the solutions to
late night drinking and look at the causes of why Street Pastors and others
are now required to carry out this valuable work'. (Extract from
Salvation Army 'War Cry' 25 June 2011) |
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More than Gold By High Dibbens The 2012 Olympics will be carnival time across the |
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To help, an
organisation called 'More than Gold' is co-ordinating and resourcing the
Churches' contribution. I myself am serving on two MTG
committees - 'Games Pastors' and the 'Prayer Team'. We are now beginning to
recruit Games Pastors (see article and video below) who will spend part of
each working session at a transport hub and part on the streets. Obviously
Street Pastors are well placed to become Games Pastors but it could be that
other friends might like to have this experience as a taster of what it might
be like to be a Street Pastor in the future! Please have a
look at the website http://www.morethangold.org.uk and if I can
be of any further help, do get in touch. Please also encourage your church's
involvement locally in outreach activities connected with the Games. West of |
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To watch a short video
about Games Pastors, click here |
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Safer
By
Tom Jenkins The Safer |
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We have been involved
with this programme since we started our operations three years ago and are
now considered to be a valuable contributor to its efforts. Of course, Safer That, of course, is
where we come in. Being shown on the Partnership’s annual plan as an active
contributor to making We have developed an
excellent relationship with the other members of the Partnership who see us as
an important aid to meeting the Partnership’s objectives. This should give us
an added incentive to do our work well and thus be true representatives of
the Lord who called us to it. To Him be all the
glory! |
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The first 'Safe Community' in the
In
June 2010, |
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By Phil Couch It became apparent to
me recently that the nature of the Care Team was not fully understood by many
Street Pastors and I therefore undertook to clarify who we are, what we do
and the reasons why we do it. |
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The Care Team was set
up to provide pastoring to the
Street Pastor team. We all respond differently to situations on the streets and
there are occasionally instances where we carry away with us some emotional
baggage. I can think of several instances where there were emotional
consequences of my own actions and responses that I needed to digest
afterwards: there have been leadership responsibilities, a time where my
deployment as a Street Pastor was aggressively challenged by someone claiming
to be suicidal, a young woman who was suffering cocaine-induced psychosis and
so on. Also, there have been many more wonderful moments where the Lord was
working on the street and through the team, and I think it’s
important for people to know that the Care Team was the initiative of Carol
Kellingray and remains pretty much unique among Street Pastoring in the Once a year, the Care
Team members phone every Street Pastor and Prayer Team member (home and
base). We do this to ensure that everyone is happy and comfortable with the
job they are doing and that, should anyone have anything to get off their
chest, they can do so. The conversations people have with the Care Team are
confidential within the Care Team. If anyone is unhappy with us phoning,
please contact a member of the team to have your name removed from the list. If there are
occasions where a situation leaves you feeling you need to talk to someone,
it is important to know that there is someone you can turn to – there is no
need to wait for your annual phone call. Ivor regularly sends out reminders
in the weekly bulletin to say who the Care Team is and how we can be
contacted, but for your information the new care team is: Janet Halstead – Phil Couch –
Alison O'Malley – Tom Jenkins – Brenda Rose – James French You’ll
find their contact details on the Street Pastors’ rota. |
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VIEW FROM THE TOP To visit the official |
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Olympians wanted!
For full details, see official website |
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THANK YOU We’d love to thank every one of the |
Contact Us
Visitors to this website and other non-members of
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