To make things simpler to grasp, we ll look at three different stages that a church needs to go through to become effective in missions. These stages are, research, education and implementation. These stages are usually linear but may not be in some cases. This first stage is vital and if not done properly, can undermine the effectiveness of the end result. Research is not just quantitative, but goes deeper into issues of purpose and goals of the church in general and of this church in particular.
Research needs to be done into a number of issues.
As you can see from the above, not all of the research is just fill in this survey styled stuff. Some of it goes into the very fundamentals of why the church exists. Thus the process can take years to fully research and needs to be done on several different levels of the church structure. The first stage of this is education. There are a number of different levels or segments of the church that need to be educated, as well as a number of different issues in which they need to be educated.