why we'd like to stay in new zealand.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise to most of you to hear that we'd like to extend our stay in New Zealand if possible; many of you even predicted it before we left. We've come to realize that there will be a painful separation either way - if we move away from the U.S. for a few years like we're keen to do, we'll miss friends and family, but if we move away from New Zealand, we'll miss friends who have become like family during the short time that we've been in Christchurch and we'll miss this incredible country that we've come to view as a home.

As we've considered our options over the last couple of months, we've decided not to limit our career options by requiring a return to Minneapolis, where the ministry jobs (we're looking for a children's or family pastor role) are usually quickly snatched up at the beginning of each summer by the graduates of three major local Christian universities. So if we're not moving back to the U.S. to be near friends and family anyway, what's to keep us from staying here in New Zealand, where we've already invested so much energy into our church community and have begun to build the new family ministries program over the last few months?

Not that wanting to stay here means that we will be able to - there are plenty of factors that will ultimately decide this, not the least of which is our visa status. At the moment we're on a work-holiday visa, which allows us to work and live here for a one-year period, which ends on August 20 of this year. This visa is non-renewable, so we'll need to find another way to stick around. Our primary options are a temporary work visa, which can be issued for a period of 1-3 years if we have a full-time job offer (we don't yet have any prospects), or residency, which we'd probably ultimately be approved for, but this process is expensive and reportedly extremely time-consuming. There's also a work-to-residency visa, which falls somewhere in between these two. We'll keep you updated - this will probably turn into an (attempted) immigration blog over the next month or so as we sort things out.

-Rachel