Values and vision are two sides of the same coin, both important to success. The process is utilizing itinerant teams to facilitate exploration of future potential models with your group, allowing you to identify and articulate His direction for you using biblical principles, yet with the freedom of cultural practices and application. The itinerant teams are specifically gifted and trained for facilitating this focus and rethinking. Facilitation is about managing a process of discovery that is thorough, open, and engages the whole community. Facilitation is not about managing or controlling the final content and direction to be taken.
Communication is a critical change facilitation skill.
As to using outside teams to come in and assist in facilitating changes, there are many benefits. It is, we must remember, a biblical process and methodology for effecting change. Outsiders are more objective, they have no past or future relationship baggage to consider, they lend fresh perspective to old problems. In short, they are ideal catalysts for change. Christian Schwarz, a church consultant in Germany, surveyed 30 people in each of 1,000 churches in 32 countries.