I received my training with Sustainable Faith‘s School of Spiritual Direction. Sustainable Faith have many schools around the world. I spent a wonderful two years with a cohort of fellow trainees in Amsterdam. I was then involved for seven years in the training of others within the schools.
How to be trained as a spiritual director
(with access for those in the UK and other European locations)
If you are interested on training as spiritual director, it is assumed you will have already a level of engagement with spiritual formation and have travel long enough in your spiritual journey to have grown in your emotional health. It can be beneficial to have already had the experience with meeting with a spiritual director yourself. I recommend this as a first step.
There are now many good places to engage in the process of formation and training as a spiritual director. As the Retreat Association advocates — the emphasis is really on formation rather than ‘training’. They note that we live in a world where there can be an over-emphasis on “the task we are engaged upon rather than the person in front of us; and on training in functionality rather than personal transformation.” For that reason any teaching of the art of spiritual direction benefits from encompassing “a wholistic sense of the development of the person, including their inner qualities and disposition that will be manifest in their practice of spiritual direction.”
The breadth and diversity of SD training across denominations and networks is a delight to see, and seems expresses the generative and generous character of God. (Shout out to LCSD, Sarum College, OCL, Launde Abbey and Sustainable Faith). I want to highlight the excellent curriculum developed by Sustainable Faith which I have first hand experience of, through receiving the training in Amsterdam, NL (2015-2017). This has been followed by several years teaching cohorts in the UK (Oxfordshire, South Wales, East Yorkshire, Nottingham and the East Midlands), and now online.
Sustainable Faith’s School of Spiritual Direction is an excellent 2-year certificate program preparing you to serve as a spiritual director. The training is a deeply formative, immersive and integrated. Sustainable Faith Inc is a non-profit organisation based in the US. The curriculum is run in cohorts in a variety of locations including online (with many time zones covered including the UTC+0, UTC+1, GMT, CET etc) — see sustainablefaith.com for further details about the courses available.