Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Now This is Innovation

What do you do when there’s drunken aggro after closing time? Send in the street pastors
The logic of it — overcoming street violence with chips — is typical of street pastors’ weirdly effective unworldliness. They start the evening with a Bible reading and prayer, and claim their work is only possible because others are praying for them. This spirituality makes itself felt not through any ostentatious zeal but rather, I sense, through a feeling that it is entirely natural to be out at 2 a.m. helping people get home. The comment they hear most often, according to Summersby, is ‘You’re mad.’ Still, there is no doubt, he says, that ‘the vast majority of people do have a respect for people who work from a faith perspective’.