Patterns
Living by the patterns God reveals rather than by principles we extract and apply ourselves.
Making disciples to pattern, in and with the local church
Atik
according to its kind
The evangelical church's commitment isn't matched by coordination or capacity.
Most church leaders want to make disciples. Fewer have the people, infrastructure, time, and culture to do it well. Atik exists to convert external capacity to internal capacity by building durable capacity inside the local church.
70%
of churches have no method for determining whether their discipleship is working
11%
name discipleship as what their church does best, last of six functions
58%
rely on an unpaid volunteer, or no one at all, to lead discipleship
66%
of churchgoers say their church offers no training for small-group leaders
Source: Lifeway Research, The State of Discipleship (2026) and State of Groups.
The coordination problem
The church is being shaped by reactive catechesis
Discipleship is a coordinating mechanism where every member of Christ's body learns to follow Christ (Matt 28:20). As congregants follow influencers whose content addresses the crisis of the moment, they participate in reactive catechesis, developing a patchwork understanding that cannot be shared with those in their local congregation.
God's people not only need shared knowledge and doctrinal conviction, but a shared understanding of how that doctrinal understanding informs the life of the community of faith embodied by a local congregation and the church worldwide.
Atik provides a curriculum that examines Christian sacred-social order, the pattern of belief, practice, and authority that binds God's people to the Triune God and to one another. Every partner congregation works through the same twelve weeks.
Eight domains of sacred-social order
Place
Receiving the places God made as meaningful and centered on his presence, not as empty space for us to design.
Time
Ordering personal and communal life around sacred rhythms that set God's people apart from the nations.
Interacting with God
Approaching God in worship, prayer, and obedience on his terms rather than ours.
Powers and Principalities
Recognizing the spiritual powers at work in politics, institutions, and systems, and withholding the allegiance owed to God alone.
Nations and Race
Naming the national and racial loyalties that shape the modern world and living as one body from every people.
Male and Female
Living as male and female image bearers in marriage, sexuality, and the church according to God's design, not cultural stereotypes.
Discipleship
Passing on the life of Christ so that faith is transmitted as a way of living, not merely as information.
The capacity problem
The church wants disciple-makers it cannot train.
J. Douglas Toma's framework for organizational capacity identifies eight interrelated elements that allow an organization to accomplish its mission. Understanding which elements a given local body is lacking allows Atik to tailor discipleship planning in and with local churches via Atik's fellows program.
The eight elements
Purpose
Mission drifts toward whatever sustains the ministry rather than toward making disciples who obey Christ.
Information
Churches assume their discipleship is working because they rarely assess it or listen to their people.
Infrastructure
Tools built for attendance, giving, and communication cannot carry the work of formation.
Culture
Congregants absorb the surrounding culture's assumptions and habits more readily than the church's.
Processes
How leaders are identified, trained, and deployed reflects every weakness upstream.
Policy
Frameworks for who teaches and how leaders qualify can reinforce drift rather than correct it.
Structure
Ministry bottlenecks at a pastor who becomes either the unchecked authority or the catch-all.
Governance
Elders oversee budgets and buildings but are rarely equipped to chart a biblical and theological path.
Coordination and capacity are linked. An uncoordinated body doesn't move with the sort of fluidity, grace, and seemingly instinctual movements that reflect deep learning and habituation to God's order. When capacities are lacking, coordination is hindered. Think of a ballet dancer trying to perform in a muddy field. Despite the dancer's level of skill, the arena in which the performance is attempted limits the dancer's potential. A church that doesn't have the right information, infrastructure, policies, processes, or human resources is likely to appear uncoordinated even if it has a strong shared understanding. That is why adding another program rarely fixes the problem, and why Atik focuses on developing the church's capacity.
The response
Converting external capacity into internal capacity.
Atik brings in what many single congregations cannot build alone, not to create ongoing dependence, but durable capacity within the congregation.
We address coordination through training.
Through Atik XII, we help develop a critical mass of individuals within a congregation who have a shared understanding of what the church is and how its life is to reflect God's sacred order.
We provide external capacity.
In addition to providing curricula, we assign well-qualified scholar-facilitators, assessments to help church leadership understand what its congregation needs, and a nine-month path for three individuals in the congregation: Atik XII followed by a six-month coached fellowship.
Fellows convert it.
While Atik XII addresses coordination, the Atik Fellows convert Atik's external capacity to internal capacity through a six-month fellowship following Atik XII, in which they develop a discipleship plan for their church and receive additional training in disciple-making.
When Atik leaves, the capacity remains.
While Atik will provide periodic ongoing training and may partner with a church across multiple cohorts, the goal is not to make the church dependent on Atik, but to build the church's internal capacity to make disciples while addressing all sorts of theological, cultural, and organizational challenges.
The program
Every partner church runs the same twelve-week cohort. Three participants from that cohort continue as Atik Fellows, preparing to disciple others as part of a broader plan they develop during the fellowship.
Weeks 1–12
The cohort
Up to twenty-five people from one congregation work through the Christian sacred-social order and the four dimensions of the Thinking Christian framework. Every participant takes pre- and post-cohort assessments.
Months 4–9
The fellowship
The church identifies three Fellows. They receive additional training, write a discipleship plan, and gain coached experience discipling others through monthly workshops led by Atik facilitators.
Year two and beyond
Internal capacity
The church ends the year with three trained Fellows leading groups and the people formed alongside them. Each year that follows, Fellows and other cohort participants spearhead disciple-making efforts in the congregation.
Atik XII
Building to spec, replicating the pattern. The pattern is the person of Christ, not a blueprint.
Week 1
Patterns. The Christian sacred-social order and discipleship: right action given in a pattern rather than derived from principles.
Weeks 2–5
Thinking in four dimensions: our relationship to reality, theo-logic, disciplined inquiry, and the four ways of knowing.
Weeks 6–12
Seven domains of sacred-social order: place, time, interacting with God, powers and principalities, nations and race, male and female, and discipleship. Week twelve is when the congregation names its three Fellows.
Source: Sacred-social order categories adapted from Kevin Flatt, Secularization, Social Order, and World History.
The evidence
Assessed, not assumed.
Atik pairs quantitative and qualitative measures with behavioral metrics, so churches can see what is changing and adjust.
Pre- and post-cohort assessment
Two instruments of Atik's own design, given before week one and after week twelve, so growth can be evaluated and gaps identified.
The church dashboard
Each participant sees their own results. Leadership receives aggregate results with identities protected, so the data can inform preaching and teaching. Weekly reflections are never shown in identifiable form.
Learning across churches
Atik evaluates data across every cohort to refine its training, and tests its own model rather than assuming it.
H0
Interaction type makes no difference: growth will be equivalent whether participants go self-guided, join a facilitated cohort, or continue as Fellows.
The instruments measure the gap between stated conviction and reported practice. They are not measures of spiritual maturity and are not clinical evaluations.
The people
Who runs Atik?
Atik is rooted in a deeply theological approach that holds the Bible as the final authority for life and faith and works with, not against, the distinctives of each local church.
James Spencer, PhD
President
PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; MA in Biblical Exegesis from Wheaton College; Harvard's Institute for Educational Management. A former academic dean with expertise in residential, online, and hybrid education, he is an elder at Skyline Church in O'Fallon, Illinois, an adjunct instructor in Wheaton's MA in Leadership, an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast. Author of Digital Discernment, Useful to God, Serpents and Doves, and Christian Resistance; his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Sojourners, and The Washington Times.
Ashish Varma, PhD
Director of Curricula & Programs
PhD in Systematic Theology from Wheaton College, with master's degrees in the History of Christianity and in Theological Studies. A former professor and program director, he is adjunct faculty at Wheaton College and a member of the American Academy of Religion and the American Philosophical Association. He has written for the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, Ex Auditu, and the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology.
Connect with Atik
Help the church make disciples according to their kind.
The need is not more programming. It is capacity that stays.
Sources: Lifeway Research, The State of Discipleship (2026) and State of Groups; Kevin Flatt, Secularization, Social Order, and World History; J. Douglas Toma, Building Organizational Capacity.