Wellington

We just returned home from our trip to Wellington, Lower Hutt, and Palmerston North. We had been able to spend more time preparing for this trip than others, yet were able to make very few connections. We had done much research for these areas and done everything that we could to help make this trip be successful, but before we left we were just not feeling good about the trip agenda. This of course, caused us to pray even more for God to guide us and introduce us to people and to fill in the days with the interviews, meetings, and places to go that we could not make happen. 

It's funny that we act surprised when God does what he promises he will do! This seemed to be one of our most successful survey trips! Each day was full on and packed! We had such a sense of unity among our team about the information that we were finding. Through the one interview that we had set up, we were able to get information about so many people and places. We ended up meeting with more people, visiting a couple of churches, and had great success in the people that we connected with in street interviews. 

We came away from the trip feeling great. We saw that Wellington is a place of great need, much like what we have been hearing. We learned that, like most places in New Zealand, Lower Hutt and Palmerston North are also places of need, but much less so than Wellington. We found that Palmerston North is considered the "Bible Belt" of New Zealand, with 16% of the people involved in church-that's about double the national average. 

We now have only three places left to visit for our first round of survey work! We will begin the narrowing down process in June and begin round two of survey work. This will be a process of narrowing the ten cities down to two or three. We will then do some more intense research on those three cities to get an even better picture of them to help us make the final decision!