When I agreed to do some reporting in the early hours of ‘nasty Friday’, the last Friday before Christmas on which drunken revellers cause havoc in city centres, I thought I might see some vomit, one or two twisted ankles – at worst, a bloody nose from a drunken punch.
Little did I know that, by one o’clock, I would be on my knees in the middle of a busy North London road, attending to a man who was critically ill after somebody stamped on his head stamped during a violent brawl.
I was out following the street pastors, a group of Christians who take to the inner city streets at night to help vulnerable people make their way home, or just to provide them with someone to talk to.
But as police and ambulance crews raced to the scene, it was left to the street pastors to take the lead. They hauled the man into the recovery position and folded a coat underneath his head.
With the exception of a passing nurse, no one else was sufficiently sober to help. Street pastor John Tibbit helped direct traffic around the victim, who couldn’t, the nurse told us, be moved. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since I’ve been coming out”, he said.
Emergency services cordoned off the area as a crime scene
Emergency services soon arrived and the street pastors stood back. Drunken revellers watched on as ambulance crew sliced through the injured man’s clothing and hooked him up to an oxygen tank. Soon afterwards, four police officers were attempting to pin his suspected attacker to the ground. The pastors moved on.
Street pastor Mary Crimes was adamant that the group do not get involved with the work of the police.
“No street pastors have ever been assaulted and we don’t want tonight to be the first,” she said. “You can’t get involved in a situation. You’ve got to keep your distance, got to keep an arm’s length distance, and then put a knife on that as well.’
The street pastors are a voluntary Christian organisation launched in April 2003 who now have over 300 trained members. They don’t evangelise, and they are not police, but wherever they are the crime rate drops, sometimes by up to 80%. As a result, they have won the respect- and official endorsement- of the Metropolitan police. “We act as a deterrent,” said Gary. “Wherever we go, you see police vans rolling out, because they don’t need to be there.”
The pastors help people in all sorts of ways, but tending to the seriously injured, as they were forced to on Friday, is unusual. Most of their work consists of talking to people. They approach night-time revellers indiscriminately: no hoody, prostitute or drugged-up clubber is to be shunned. “These people are no different to us,” Gary insisted. “You just have to speak and interact with them.”
On one occasion, Mary told me, a street pastor approached a woman “who looked sad”, and spoke to her. It later emerged that she had been planning to kill herself that night. Mary says: “You’ve got to remember that there are all sorts of people out there with all sorts of problems. A lot of people out there night are very vulnerable. That’s why they’re out.”
In Wood Green, where the majority of our time that night was spent, binge drinking is not the only issue. Gary, who grew up in the area, says there are problems with teen gangs as well. “Most of the boys I grew up with were in prison for armed robbery by the time I was 18,” he says. “But I had my dad as a reference point. Take my Dad out of that picture and I can’t work out how I would had the confidence to make my own decisions and not be led. I don’t judge people who haven’t had that.”
The street pastors talk to vulnerable people on the streets at night
Their reluctance to judge or impose their beliefs appears has allowed the street pastors to develop a real rapport with the community. Dennis McAye, a bouncer at a nearby pub, says: “I love seeing them. I’ve never had a conversation with any one of them where they’ve talked about god to me, all they bring is friendliness. They just make people feel good and safe.”
But this is a church project, and there is no shyness on the street pastors’ behalf about stating that they are doing “Christ’s work.” It’s just that, as John says, the church has been forced to reach out to those who are failing to reach out to them.
As he showed me around the empty church where they met at the start of their walk, John told me that there was no point in Christians staying in church. “The church has to move with the times,” he said, gesturing to the empty pews. “People aren’t coming to us. So we have to go to them where they are.”
2 Comments
January 2, 2009 at 11:57 am
Excellent post Kat. It’s refreshing to read a blog about something other than our (my) musings about topics we (I) know little about. Did you go our with these chaps for work experience?
January 25, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I did indeed. It was fascinating – well worth the unsociable hours!