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This past year has been a busy one for Vineyard Records UK (VRUK - pronounced 'vee-rook'!) and it's good to look back and see how God has been faithful with our plans.

So, what have we been up to??

January - we mixed the 'Love Divine' album in Stockholm of all places! We think the location had something to do with it but the real reason is that we used a great guy called Bo Reimer to mix it.. who is Swedish... and lives in Stockholm.
We also attended the Vineyard National Leaders Conference where Terry Virgo shared his wisdom, experience and heart for the Church in the UK. Totally inspiring and also a great time for us to connect with some 600 leaders from the UK Vineyard churches.

February - towards the end of the month we took the Great Big God event to the USA, stopping first at the Maryland Vineyard in Baltimore and then onto Anaheim Vineyard in sunny southern California. Maryland was very cold and we were blessed with a foot of snow on our afternoon trip to see Washington DC. Anaheim was very warm and we even got to swim in a very cold pool. The events consisted of doing a GBG Praise Party for the kids as well as doing some training for kids workers.
Also in February Vineyard Records hosted the first-ever acoustic unplugged stage at the Christian Booksellers Convention in Telford which proved to be a resounding success - well, the CBC board have asked us to do it again next year so we must have done something right!

March - we launched the Love Divine album with a listening party for all the songwriters and musicians involved with the project. Soul Survivor church in Watford kindly lent us their very cool venue for the evening and we played the completed album to eager ears! Many of the participants in the project hadn't heard the album songs since the recording night the previous November but thankfully they were happy with the final result!

April - Chris & Jeremy flew to Kiev for some chicken and meetings with Ukrainian and Russian pastors. VRUK has been involved in supporting a number of churches in Eastern Europe as well as helping fund and resource some orphanages in southern Ukraine. We are thrilled to see God working powerfully in that region and bit by bit opening people's hearts to His love. It's a privilege to be involved at such an influencial time for the church there. Back in the UK the East Anglia regional worship leaders retreat took place at a wonderful priory in Sussex. Over 40 worship leaders from the region attended for some inspirational teaching by Simon Ponsonby.

May - VRUK hosted the first ever northern Vineyard worship leaders retreat at the wonderfully remote venue of Gartmore House, nr Stirling. John & Ele Mumford (National Director of Vineyard Churches UK) shared with us how the Vineyard movement began in the UK over 20 years ago and what worship has meant to the movement ever since. Matt Turrigiano also shared with us and on the Saturday evening the Spirit of God fell in the room with such power that everyone was touched deeply. It felt like a 'holy moment' and we look forward to the fruit that will come from it.

June - an eventful month in several aspects! First, VRUK was proud to be involved in the Passion 07 event at Stoke-on-Trent with The Burn Band playing to a crowd of 1500 people. By all accounts they went down a storm (even though it was a sunny, hot day). The week following we had our southern worship leaders retreat at Lee Abbey in N Devon. With over 120 worship leaders in attendance, it was, again, a wonderful time of fellowship, bringing together the worship community from the southern Vineyard churches. We had our good friend Randall Butler come over from the US to share his long-time experience of worship leading. Randall is a veteran Vineyard worship leader having served under John Wimber in the early years of the Vineyard's influencial era of making worship 'culture current'.

Immediately following the retreat, another event occurred which gained national headline news - the BIG FLOODS! We didn't escape the flooding and our ground floor was up to a foot deep in brown, smelly floodwater for 3 days. Thankfully we were able to rescue the servers and other vital equipment before the floods hit us. The renovation work still continues!

July - VRUK alongwith the Hull and Bristol Vineyards took a team of 15 people to work for a week in an orphanage in southern Ukraine. Covering everything from drama, arts & crafts, sports and lots and lots of fun, our remit was to show the love of God to the kids, many of whom had no natural parents. Our theme through the week was that of Moses with the message 'God can use all of us to achieve great things for Him!'. The weather was baking hot (low 40s celcius) but the team were brilliant and we came back far more impacted than we'd anticipated. Plans are afoot for another team to go back there next May.

August - a fairly quiet month - thank goodness! The Trent band led worship at New Wine south for Venue 2 and were, as always, excellent!

September - the VRUK went away for a couple of days on 'retreat' - which was more of a 'thinktank' session. Given our busyness, we try to schedule in at least one of these times each year to enable us to really focus on planning for the future.

September also saw Chris & Nathan join with Cross Rhythms in their Ben Nevis Challenge to raise money and profile for more new Christian radio stations around the UK. You can read more about this feat in the blog entry.

Chris, Jeremy & Alex went to New York for 3 days to meet with our counterparts from Vineyard Music USA. This proved to be a productive time of discussing plans of close cooperation, principally through marketing efforts and joint productions. From NY, we flew directly to Oslo where we met and did some training with the Nordic Vineyard pastors. Joining us in Oslo to lead worship were members of the Hull Vineyard worship team.

October - quiet..... but important for us to attend to those important things that need, importantly, to be done!

November - this was the month of Area meetings. The Vineyard movement in the UK is divided up into regions to enable effective governance and development of the churches in those regions. For 3 consecutive weekends, Area meetings were held around the UK. This gave VRUK an invaluable opportunity to present to the leaders of these regions the plans, products and resources we have or are developing to enable worship in our churches to flourish. First up was the SE & London Area, followed by the SW region, followed by the Northern region. In amongst these, we also supported a Midland region worship training event in Birmingham.
At the end of November, Chris, Alex & Nathan attended the UK Songwriters Consultation hosted by Graham Kendrick. This was a great time to connect with the wider worship and songwriting community.

December - the usual Christmas rush! We close for the holidays on Friday 21st December and will see you again on January 2nd 2008!

From all of us, to all of you, have a blessed, happy and fulfilled Christmas and may 2008 be a year of God's favour and blessing for you!

The VRUK Team - Chris, Jeremy, Paul, Nathan, Alex, Dave & Irene.

The VRUK office will be closing on December 21st and Opening again on January 2nd. The website will still be available to take orders and we will get these in the post to you as soon as we return.

We hope you have a Merry Christmas.

The VRUK office will be closed today (18th Dec) for a staff day.

Shopping for Christmas? If you place an order before 3pm on the 19th Dec through the website we will have your order in the post before Royal Mail's Christmas deadline.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas - with just a few days until Christmas we thought it was time to give a few presents.

Everyone who buys something between now and Christmas Day* will get a Christmas present from us. Just make sure you ask for your Christmas present in the comments section of the checkout (and mention that you heared about this in the blog) and we will put something extra in the post to you with your order.

Even if you don't buy anything you can pick up a free mp3 download of the song "Comfort Me" that's not available anywhere else. Just add it to your basket in the VRUK store checkout and you won't pay a penny. Click here for the free song.

* NB - If you order after 3pm on Dec 19th your parcel will probably not arrive until January. The office will be closed from 21st Dec to 2nd Jan.

Its not long until the postman will be collecting his bag from VRUK, its probably the last bag of post that will get to you before Christmas. So if you want anything winging its way to you in that bag be sure to place your order before 3pm on Wednesday 19th December.

Merry Christmas. :-)