Perhaps best known for the number of flip-flops they distribute to barefoot revellers, there are now more than 400 fully trained Street Pastors operating in Scotland, with new groups emerging regularly.
The visit by the Rev Les Isaac is seen as an endorsement of the work done in Scotland and his seven-day whistlestop tour of all 17 Scottish projects will mark the fifth anniversary of the street-based aid organisation north of the border and its 10th anniversary worldwide.
The Perth project was launched in 2008 and now has more than 30 Street Pastors working between 10pm and 3am on Thursday and Saturday nights.
Local management group chairman Michael Archibald said: “The five years that we have been out in Perth has been life changing — for the environment, for those we meet, and for ourselves. We don’t speak about our faith until those we meet ask, and they do — frequently.”
Mr Isaac will visit Perth on Saturday June 1 and will attend a breakfast event in the Salutation Hotel, where he will meet local Street Pastors and will commission three new smart card.
Looking forward to his first tour of Scotland, he said he hoped his visits would encourage and re-enthuse the growing body of Street Pastors.
“The growth of Street Pastors in Scotland has been phenomenal and we are currently in talks to look at setting up projects in at least a further five towns,” he said.
“The work these projects do has been well received and the Street Pastors have become a welcome sight in Scottish town and city centres.
“My wife Louise and I are looking forward to meeting as many people involved with the Scottish projects as possible and seeing the work they carry out right across the country.”
Sandy Scrimgeour, chairman of the Street Pastors’ umbrella body — the Ascension Trust (Scotland) — said it was a “real coup” to host Mr Isaac on his first ever nationwide tour.
“Reverend Isaac has never made a tour like this before and we’re delighted that he’s agreed to undertake this demanding schedule to mark the fifth anniversary of Street Pastors in Scotland,” he said.
“We want him to witness the amazing work his vision has fostered in Scotland. Street Pastors is not only sustainable but also has the potential to expand into Scotland’s daytime economy, with projects being looked at involving schools and shopping centres.
“I believe we could see the number of projects double in Scotland in the next few years.”
Based on a model launched by Mr Isaac in Lambeth and Hackney in London in 2003, Street Pastor projects across Scotland have already earned widespread acclaim and Mr Scrimgeour is in no doubt that they are saving lives.
He said: “It’s not just about handing out flip-flops. Street Pastors offer a raft of practical help as well as a non-judgmental ear, and often the calm comfort of a member of our team can defuse high-tension, aggressive situations — thereby preventing injury or arrest — or even act in a suicide intervention role, averting tragedy. Nationally, it has been proven that street crime drops in areas where Street Pastors operate and they are seen as a much more approachable presence by all ages.
This is the point where I should stress that I'm not some Trek purist with a serious investment in seeing Gene Roddenberry's creation preserved in amber, unchanged since its maiden voyage in 1966. I've always been a casual Star Trek fan at best, and even then mostly of the movies rather than any of its various TV incarnations. (I've probably seen The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home more times than I've seen episodes of the Original Series.) Furthermore, I thoroughly enjoyed Abrams's first mission aboard the Enterprise, which lent the film series a sense of blockbuster spectacle it had always strived to achieve... but too often fell short. The '09 reboot also made some bold creative moves (killing off Kirk's father, blowing up Vulcan) that freshened up the franchise while still managing to capture the spirit of what had come before. At that point, of course, Trek neophyte Abrams still felt some sense of responsibility to the core fanbase and, if anything, bent over backwards to make sure they felt respected. (The entire storyline with Leonard Nimoy's Spock, for example, was a calculated and really pretty ingenious act of fan service, letting serious Trekkies know that the new movies would be taking place in a pocket universe, thus preserving the integrity -- and continuity -- of the timeline they knew and loved.)
More than $250 million in domestic box office returns later, though, and Abrams is suddenly a lot less concerned about keeping in tune with the franchise's past. Armed with a higher budget and flashier effects (including IMAX cameras and the now-ubiquitous 3D conversion), Into Darkness fully embraces the excess that the previous film warped in and out of. The tone for this outing is set in the pre-credits sequence, which finds the dynamic duo of Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) on an alien planet that they've been sent to monitor in secret, so as not to violate the ol' Prime Directive, which essentially translates as "Don't stick your nose in another culture's business." But that rule goes out the window when an erupting volcano threatens to decimate the planet's indigenous population, a fate that Spock seeks to prevent by beaming directly into the volcano with a device that will calm its fury.
Meanwhile, a disguised Kirk has nabbed an artifact from an indigenous temple and is scampering Temple Run-style across this alien landscape until he arrives at the Enterprise's hiding place... beneath the ocean waves. How exactly can a starship function underwater? Who cares! Wouldn't Spock's internal logic detector inform him that beaming directly into an erupting volcano is a highly illogical idea? Doesn't matter! Abrams and his writing team wanted a splashy way to open the movie and ran with both of these scenarios for their cool factor rather than internal consistency. For a series that has so often prided itself on infusing its grand adventures with grand ideas, Into Darkness repeatedly and unapologetically sacrifices science-fiction thoughtfulness on the altar of blockbuster "Wow."
To be fair, a number of those "Wow" moments do deliver big-time, because Abrams is nothing if not a supremely confident showman. And as that opening sequence makes clear, his primary goal with Into Darkness is to use the Enterprise and its crew in ways that no one had thought to use them before, physics be damned. That's how we end up with such visually spectacular (and fundamentally absurd) set-pieces as a warp-speed drag race that ends with one ship knocking the other clear out of the warp gulf-stream or a scene where Kirk blasts himself out of the Enterprise airlock for a zero gravity flight between spaceships. But underpinning all these feats is the very real sense that Abrams and Co. aren't interested in anything but playing with their very expensive toys.
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