Becoming a Spiritual Director
If you desire to journey with people as they seek to deepen their experience of God, undertaking a formational Spiritual Direction course may be for you.
Jonny received his formational training with Sustainable Faith’s School of Spiritual Direction in Amsterdam and has since become one of the teaching team at SustainableFaith.com
The School of Spiritual Direction
Sustainable Faith’s School of Spiritual Direction is a 2-year certificate program preparing you to serve as a spiritual director. The training is a deeply formative, immersive and integrated. The SSD curriculum is run in cohorts in a variety of locations and also online. Jonny will be teaching online cohorts in 2026. (New details cohorts later in the year to come.)
January ’26 Cohort Schedule: Dates and Times
This format for the online School of Spiritual Direction will distribute the learning over weekly meetings. The curriculum will be the same as the in-person teaching with 5 modules covering: Story & Conversation, Self-Awareness & the Enneagram, Discernment & Group Direction, Stages of Faith.
The times below refer to UK & EU-West Timezones (and may be accessible for those in adjacent timezones)
Module 1 begins Saturday, January 17th, 2026 with a full days teaching online (9:00 – 5:00 pm) . The year will continue for the following weeks on Wednesday evenings 6:30 – 8:00 pm. There will be a breaks between modules of 1 or 2 weeks (and a longer for the summer period).
See sustainablefaith.com for further details about the course and how to apply. Cohort reference: “SSD1 2026 Online UK/EU – Norridge”
Choosing a spiritual direction course as part of your on going formation
There are now many good places to engage in the process of formation and training as a spiritual director. The breadth and diversity of SD training across denominations and networks is a delight to see, and expresses something the generative and generous character of God.
The emphasis of a good spiritual direction course is on formation rather than simply training. As the Retreat Association also notes: we live in a time where there can be an over-emphasis on “the task we are engaged upon rather than the person in front of us… on training in functionality rather than personal transformation.” And so any teaching of spiritual direction needs to attend to the development of the whole person including “inner qualities and disposition that will be manifest in their practice of spiritual direction.”
The excellent curriculum developed by Sustainable Faith is a course that exemplifies this formational approach. I have personally benefited from this — starting with being a student on the course 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 Inc is a non-profit organisation based in the US with courses accessed by students across the world.
If you have any more questions please get in touch.