What to expect when you become a Street Pastor

As Rugby Elim trains new recruits By Rachael, Hope UK

A bouncer asks for help with a girl unconscious from drink – what do you do? How do you help someone who’s high and distressed? Drug and alcohol awareness is a crucial part of Street Pastors’ training. This month, as Rugby Elim readies new recruits to serve on the streets, we find out more.

Our Street Pastors have been actively patrolling the streets of Rugby for 16 years

We go out on Friday and Saturday nights to support clubbers and people who might be lonely, but in recent years we’ve also started doing market patrols on Friday mornings and going out after school on one estate. We’ve got 42 volunteers, backed by 26 prayer pastors.

Each week we have loads of interventions, conversations and help keep people safe. Most of that starts with a smile and a hello, whether that’s on the streets at 2 a.m. or on a bench mid-afternoon. This month we’ll begin preparing our new volunteers, who will complete 50 hours of training before they’re commissioned. Within that, they do a module on drugs and alcohol awareness, taught by Rachael from Hope UK.

The training Rachael gives is really important. While going to the pub is normal for some people, other volunteers have never been in one or seen the night time economy, so it can be quite a shock for them.

Having insight from a Christian point of view is really valuable – knowing what to do in all manner of situations, being able to keep people safe and getting them the help they need. The volunteers will put what they learn into practice straight away.

They’ll deal with drunkenness and spiking regularly, for example, but you can’t assume someone is drunk or has taken drugs unless they tell you. Rachael’s training means we can identify that and get people further help.

It helps as we work with CCTV teams, door staff and landlords too. We have a really close working relationship with them, so if they think anybody’s drunk, has taken drugs or is in a bad way they will call us for support.

Door staff have their jobs to do – like breaking up fights or removing people – but they’ll also radio us for help if they’ve got an unconscious girl, for example. They might be six foot tall and tough, but they will deliver her so gently and kindly. Even though most of them don’t have a faith they value what we do and know we can help. We can phone parents, friends or ambulances and help her get home safely.

We bring a peaceful presence and conclusion to many situations without having to get the police involved. Most of the time, things calm down straight away just through us being there. We have a uniform but we’re not there to enforce anything. Days later, people often recognise our uniforms and tell us, “You saved my life last week!”

Our strapline is “caring, listening, helping” and that covers everything we do – as Christians going out to demonstrate our faith practically on the streets.

In the drug module I deliver to the team in Rugby

One of the things we look at is the background to drugs themselves – what the different drugs are and what effects they have on the body.

We look at the law too and anything relevant that’s happening at the time. Over the years I’ve talked about changes in the law, like nitrous oxide being made illegal, and the increase of vaping, for example. The second half of the training looks at why people use drugs, and ends with case studies exploring what might happen or how to respond and how to judge whether things are drug or alcohol-related or not.

Say a young woman who’s panicky and distressed comes to you with a friend who tells you she’s taken something. We’ll have just learned how people can get paranoid from drugs so the team will likely go down that path for a while. But then I throw in a curveball. How do they know this person is actually a friend? How do they know the girl hasn’t just been date-raped, the “friend” was involved and is blaming her distress on drugs rather than letting her tell you what’s going on?

That’s quite hardcore, but Street Pastors need to be aware that there could be all sorts of reasons for what they’ll see. Another example is where someone is staggering down the street. What do you do? Around 99 per cent of the time it’ll be alcohol-related, but what if the person is actually a diabetic having a hypo?

They’ll also see people smoking cannabis. What should they do? They’ll have just talked about drugs being illegal so will often say they’d tell the police, but in most cases it’s not actually their place to report crimes.

Nobody would talk to Street Pastors if they reported every crime every time. It’s about getting the balance right.

The bigger picture nationally is that the nighttime culture has really changed, especially since Covid. In certain cities we’re seeing a decline in young people drinking, though that isn’t the case everywhere.

This means Street Pastors’ role is changing. They’re almost a 24-hour service now, out on the streets at any time of day, there to protect vulnerable people in whatever situation.

I would actually love Hope UK to get to the point where, in a drug and alcohol context, we don’t need to be there anymore because people are acting sensibly. That said, in whatever situation they’re in, Street Pastors are needed to keep people safe. They’re not the police or any other authority, they’re simply people who care, and the people they help understand that.

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.