A partnership with local churches
to build the body of Christ in local contexts.
Plate I — Why this is needed
Churches value small groups and rely on them to carry formation. Very few can tell whether they work, and fewer still equip the people who lead them.
of churches have any method of measuring discipleship. Twenty-nine percent evaluate it regularly.
of churchgoers say their church provides no training for the people who lead its groups.
rank discipleship as what their church does best — last of six functions.
Lifeway Research, State of Discipleship and State of Groups; Barna, Discipleship in Community, 2025.
Meanwhile congregations are consolidating into larger churches, attending less often, and drifting from settled conviction. Fifty-eight percent of evangelicals affirm that everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God; forty-seven percent that God accepts the worship of all religions. The problem is not that people lack information. It is that they are formed all week by an order that works against the one confessed on Sunday.
Plate II — How the partnership runs
Atik brings what a single congregation cannot build alone — a cohort, coaching, curricula, and a framework for spiritual maturity. What leaves is not a program. It is people your church already has, formed to lead, who stay.
A nine-month cohort, coaching in each of those months, curricula fitted to your congregation, and a framework your Fellows learn by practising it.
Fellows who have gone first, each leading a small group inside your existing structure, and who keep leading after the cohort year ends.
Three Fellows per church across the opening eight-church pilot, two per church once the partnership widens to twelve. The cohort is capped at twenty-four throughout.
Atik provides
Nine months · capped at 24
Monthly · one to one
Fitted to your church
Three across the program
Your congregation
Identifies Fellows · communicates about the initiative · receives program reports
Goes first
Three to five people, inside your existing structure. Continues past the year.
Goes first
Three to five people, inside your existing structure. Continues past the year.
Congregation · neighbors · the ordinary week
Reports to leadership concern the program and the small groups — never a Fellow's interior life.
Plate III — What accumulates
Fellows are prepared for nine months before they lead. Each then takes a small group of three to five and keeps leading afterward, so a congregation gains trained leaders every year rather than a program that has to be restarted. The chart below follows a single partner congregation across five years, beginning with four Fellows and adding four each year.
Move across to advance the years · one congregation · each ring is a cohort year, newest at the outside
Plate IV — Terms
Plate V — The parts
Fellows and small group members work through a guided assessment on Tailored. Individual reports stay with the individual; your leadership sees the congregational pattern, and that pattern shapes the year.
Read more → 02 · CohortIn person and on Zoom. Structured around sacred-social order and a calm, thoughtful, theological cadence of life.
Read more → 03 · CoachingWorking sessions on materials and on what is actually happening in the Fellow's small group. Judgment spoken to the person, not about them.
Read more → 04 · StudyReading, reflection, and practice fitted to the congregation, with a short daily textual rhythm holding the ordinary week.
Read more → 05 · Small groupsThree to five members each, inside your existing structure. What the Fellow carries in is practice — what was attempted, what it cost, where it went badly.
Read more → 06 · DialoguesFour a year, hosted across the partnership and framed around questions Fellows have raised locally.
Read more → 07 · ContinuingQuarterly gatherings, no individual coaching. Earlier Fellows keep leading while a new pair enters the cohort.
Read more →Plate VI — And we check our work
Formation is usually assumed rather than assessed. Every participant completes the same three assessments — a baseline, a midpoint, and a close — and partner churches populate four different arms, so we can see what the structure is actually doing rather than trusting that it works. The hypothesis is stated in advance. We publish what we find, whichever way it runs.
Plate VII — Two organizations
Thinking Christian provides public conversations through interviews with scholars. Atik is dedicated to discipleship. The two organizations share a framework and a body of material, collaborating together and informing one another.
Podcast, questions and answers, articles, essays, and books. Public and free. It terminates in itself.
Cohort, coaching, curricula, and assessment, delivered into eight partner congregations, widening to twelve. Donor funded.