Annual Report for January – December 2018

Warminster Street Pastors is an interdenominational Church initiative that seeks to respond positively to the issues facing the night time economy in our town. This October we celebrated our 7th birthday.

Street Pastors connect with our community by offering a listening ear, a kind word, or more practical help such as a pair of flip flops to a girl carrying her uncomfortable shoes, or being a calming presence when
tempers fray at the end of an alcohol-fuelled night.

We have trained 34 Street Pastors since 2011, with currently 16 on the rota who give up their Friday night once a month; we also have a team of 24 Prayer Pastors who pray for the Street Pastors, the town and the
night time economy. This year we have added 2 new Street Pastors and 2 new Prayer Pastors to our number. We have also appointed a Prayer Pastor Coordinator.

As well as regular Friday night patrols, Street Pastors attend other events. This year Warminster Street Pastors participated in both the Summer and Winter Solstice at Stonehenge, and also had a stand at the Spring in the Park event in town.

We aim to demonstrate God’s love in all that we do, and in the last twelve months we have helped people in the following ways:

We’ve offered a listening ear to many, given out numerous hugs and handed out thousands of lollipops!

We’ve had 1180 conversations during the year; 56 of these were with youngsters under 18 – down by about 30% on previous years. Other conversations were pretty much as in recent years with marginally more with under 25’s than over 25’s by about 10%. Whatever their age group, the people we meet are genuinely interested in what we do and why we do it, and we are able to share the love of Jesus in many of our conversations.

With patrols on Friday evenings, our Street Pastors have given over 900 voluntary hours to our community during 2018, spread over 48 evenings. For a second year we have seen a reduction in the number of hours
and evenings patrolled, due to insufficient Street Pastors being available to put out a team on some nights.
Sadly, two of our Street Pastors who have been with us since the beginning have retired from active patrol for health reasons, but we are hopeful we can add to our number in 2019.

Warminster Street Pastors is a Registered Charity No 1142893