26 street pastors from Chippenham, Warminster, Salisbury, Andover, bath, Southampton and Gosport joined together to serve at this year’s summer solstice where an estimated 13000 people attended.
Invited once again by English heritage we mingled with members of the public and staff to care listen and help.
The solstice is completely different to a normal SP night, with the solstice being an alcohol free event, our main role chatting and offering a smiley face. We gave out lots of lollipops and recognising our sensitive approach to people we were asked by security to help rouse people in the morning so they could clear the site.
We were made to feel extremely welcome by the crowd with one male coming up to the team and saying ‘streetpastors that means your a Christian, why are you at a pagan festival’ we explained why and he replied ‘wow, thank you, welcome to the solstice family
The CEO of Stonehenge came up and wanted to say thank you, the Head of Security felt so lucky to have us and couldn’t stop saying thank you and the Solstice Coordinator who I have been working with to pull this deployment off was so grateful and we have provisional invites to the winter solstice and they want us back next year too.