Caleb Meakins is part of a team of friends that run Shift. He is passionate about the intersection of church, business and media, and currently works closely with investors in Africa to build sustainable businesses that positively impact the continent. Check out his thoughts on New Year's Eve in this guest blog.
From as far back as I can remember New Year's Eve has always been an anti-climax, from getting drunk for the first time at 12 years old at my local church vicar’s house-party in South East London, to losing my 14-year-old cousin in the crowds at Trafalgar Square, finding him in the early hours of the morning in a police van terrified by the prospect of never getting found.
In 2011, inspired by my new found faith in Jesus, a group of friends and I decided we wanted to recapture this significant evening, and use it to bring our focus back on God. We’d run Alpha together on campus so thought it wouldn’t be too hard to try and make an event like this happen. Oh boy, how wrong we were.
Now, when you are a student, you think anything is possible, or at least we did. We thought a big church in London would be over the moon to give us their venue, and we hoped everything would fall into place in time for New Year's Eve, which was only 3 months away! Well, that’s not what happened. No church wanted to touch us with a barge pole. And looking back, I guess I don’t blame them. Would you give your rich, historic building to a bunch of wild young students you’d never met before, who wanted throw a ‘huge new years eve party’?
After several dozen 'no's and slowly coming to terms with the idea that this might not actually happen, we received a response from St Paul’s Hammersmith, in West London, inviting us in to ‘chat’. We couldn’t believe it! We jumped into a car and made the 3-hour journey down to London in 2 hours. Long story short, they said ‘yes’. We later discovered, they’d rung Miriam from Fusion asking whether we were legit. We had only met Miriam a few months earlier but she vouched for us!
5 years on, and we are now throwing our 4th NYE event, each year growing in number. We are pumped by the prospect that people are getting excited by the vision we have ‘to see our generation captured by God and impacting culture’. We do a lot more than New Year's Eve now, and we don’t include our accidental match-making services in this (now on 3 weddings and counting). We run several events a year and we are cultivating a community across the UK that is characterized by their risk-taking passionate pursuit of Jesus.
We will be meeting at St John-at-Hackney this year, with an amazing guy called Tim Chaddick from LA, coming and speaking to us. We will bring in 2017 praying to and worshipping our God and then after the countdown we’ll celebrate all God has done in 2016 with a BIG party. Come on down and join us if you are around!
