Components.

Atik uses Tailored, the formation platform built on the Thinking Christian framework, to establish where your congregation actually stands before we decide what the year will hold.

Each Fellow and each small group member completes a guided assessment, and the assessment is offered to the full congregation as well. These are self-reflection tools rather than psychological tests. The goal is to gain insight into your congregation's understanding of how the world works.

The assessment encourages and facilitates an extended, honest conversation about a person's understanding of God, his sacred order, and the way their individual and social lives embody the desire for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Results produce a set of trends identifying where God's word needs room to speak, and a study plan keyed to those results. Two recalibration sessions a year let a person compare who they are now with who they were.

• Reflecting God's Order asks what your people's lives reveal about what they actually believe — where rival patterns have displaced God's claim on time, money, work, and relationships. It does not ask what a person affirms in theory.
• Biblical and Theological Literacy asks whether your people have the categories Scripture requires — whether covenant, kingdom, and the nature of the church are operative in how they reason, or merely known.

Everyone takes both. Together they show what your congregation understands and whether that understanding is governing anything. That picture is the starting point for the work the Fellows and their small groups take up: how to model a way of life attuned to God's order — going first in the congregation rather than standing apart from it. What the assessments surface is not a problem to be solved from the outside. It is the particular set of pressures these people are living under, and the shape their faithfulness will have to take.

Individual results roll up into a congregational picture, and individual results remain anonymous. No pastor or leader will know who gave a particular set of responses. The report provides insight into the major influences hindering the congregation from becoming more like Christ, and into what would help them become more like Christ. That picture informs what the Fellows study, what the small groups take up first, and where we begin. Two partner churches in the same year will not receive the same material in the same order.

A person's own report belongs to that person. Neither Atik nor your leadership uses an individual's results to evaluate them. Formation that is reported upward stops being honest, and honesty is the only condition under which any of this works.

We do not score maturity. Maturity is a condition, not a total, and the markers that matter — what a person reaches for under pressure, how readily they confess, what they do for someone who cannot repay them — are invisible to any instrument. These assessments are mirrors, not grades. They tell a person where to look. Recognition of what is actually forming happens over time, in coaching and in small groups, among people close enough to say honestly what they see.

The cohort works through biblical and theological material focused on the development of a sacred-social order, addressing questions that include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. How are our individual and social lives to reflect God's order?
2. How do we transmit a way of life to the next generation?
3. How do we draw others into our lives?
4. How might we think about economics, government, technology, art and entertainment, and culture more generally?
5. How are we to interact with the Triune God?
6. How does our reflection of God's order condition the way we interact with those with whom we disagree?

The curriculum is rooted in the study of the biblical text and orthodox theology, and it works to interrupt patterns that have been forming your people without their consent. In doing so, we reconstruct a theological disposition: an understanding of the way the world works, and instincts that lead us to respond to the Triune God from within a situation rather than reacting to the situation itself. What settles over the year is a cadence — calm, thoughtful, theological — that a Fellow carries into work, family, and neighborhood rather than only into church.

The cohort meets in person at least twice during the year for a three-day retreat, once at the beginning and once at the end. Other meetings are held over Zoom or as hybrid gatherings. The in-person gatherings allow Fellows and Atik staff to form relationships, which the Zoom sessions then reinforce and maintain.

Fellows from other congregations, at varying stages, working on the same problems in different settings. Much of what a Fellow learns comes from hearing how something went wrong somewhere else first.

Three things, usually in this order. What is actually happening in the Fellow's small group — who has stopped coming, what fell flat, what opened up unexpectedly. The material, where it has not landed or has raised more than it settled. And the Fellow's own formation, which is the part most easily deferred and least easily recovered.

Coaching is where someone who knows the Fellow says what they see — encouragement where it is earned, correction where it is needed — and where the Fellow can say what they would not say in a room of twenty-four.

Personal matters discussed between a Fellow and a coach stay between them. Reports to church leadership concern the program and the small groups, not a Fellow's interior life.

Two full-time staff, splitting the cohort so that each carries a manageable number of relationships.

Each Fellow keeps a short, fixed pattern of reading and prayer through the ordinary week. Not a heavy assignment — a durable one. The pattern of Deuteronomy 17, where the king writes out the law and reads it all the days of his life, holds the king's heart from being lifted up over his brothers. Continuous immersion does what episodic instruction cannot.

Fellows work through full-length material rather than clips and summaries. Sustained reading is itself a formative practice, and it runs directly against habits that shorter formats have trained into all of us.

Each stretch of study carries something to attempt before the next gathering — most often something to give up, refuse, or begin. Some of what a Fellow needs to know cannot be understood before it is done. It is learned by doing it and looking back.

What a Fellow reads and attempts follows from the congregational assessment. The reading list is not the same across the cohort.

Small groups are part of the local church and fit within your small group ministry if you have one. They remain when the cohort year ends. We supply material and collaborative oversight, but the groups are not Atik branded.

The Fellow facilitates discussion and provides general coordination. Above that, the Fellow goes first, describing their own experiences and reflections. A group absorbs a great deal from watching someone go first and very little from being told what to do.

Three to five participants encourages depth of reflection and relationship. Atik is designed for the longer work of forming disciples rather than for a larger initial movement whose momentum may prove difficult to sustain.

Over time these groups become your congregation's vanguard, encouraging and inspiring discipleship and the deep spiritual maturity that makes Christian discernment possible, multiplying across a five-year partnership.

A Dialogue happens at a Fellow's invitation and takes up a question your local leadership and congregation have raised, so that the local congregation drives the agenda. Atik staff are available to consult on topics. The visiting voices reinforce what your people have been hearing from someone they know, rather than introducing an unrelated topic that competes with it.

A Dialogue can occur between a single speaker and a congregation or among a panel of guests. In either case, congregations are encouraged to leave time for attendees to familiarize themselves with materials provided by Atik and to come with questions for the speaker or panel.

They give your congregation the ability to interact with Atik staff and affiliate speakers on questions crucial to local congregational life. Dialogues provide visibility into what your Fellows have been doing, and they add value to your church by offering an event you can advertise to your community.

Dialogues are not a substitute for church attendance or other study, nor should they be treated as bringing in an outside voice to settle a local question. We inform your congregation's conversation rather than offering firm solutions to local concerns.

Fellows keep leading their small groups. They gather quarterly with Fellows from other years and other congregations, over Zoom or at in-person events facilitated by Atik. They also stay connected through instructional materials Atik makes available.

Individual monthly coaching ends when the cohort year does, though Atik leadership remains available for advice and counsel on an ad hoc basis. The relationship between Fellows and Atik staff is not intended to create long-term dependency. During the cohort year, Fellows are encouraged to find local mentors and guides who will help them continue to grow once that year is complete.

Your church sends two new Fellows each year for five years. By the end of the fifth year a partner congregation has ten trained leaders and ten small groups — up to fifty people — with earlier Fellows helping newer ones. What began as an outside program is by then a local practice with a history and its own people.

We want our partners to develop a discipleship culture the church sustains without us. A partnership runs for a set term, normally five years, and its aim is that no dependency on Atik remains at the end of it. That is not the same as walking away. As the world changes and new challenges arise, we may be able to serve your ministry again through a fresh partnership. Cultivating spiritual maturity is complex work, and it does not always confine itself to a pre-set term.