Spiritual directors meet spiritually curious people where they are (2024)

(RNS) — Sam Herrmann grew up homeschooled in an evangelical family and attended Liberty University, where he started questioning his upbringing during a tumultuous time on campus. Jerry Falwell Jr., the school’s president at the time, had endorsed Donald Trump for U.S. president, but Herrmann felt Trump contradicted what he learned as a kid in church.

Now, as a 28-year-old doctoral student of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Herrmann considers himself a “Chreaster,” the slang term used for people who only attend church on Christmas and Easter.

Instead, Herrmann meets monthly with a spiritual director, something he’s consistently done for over six years. Spiritual direction is an ancient practice in which a trained guide listens to someone as they explore their personal spirituality, allowing a person to ask spiritual questions without feeling subject to someone else’s agenda.

“Pastors have conviction, but with Linda,” Herrmann said, referring to his spiritual director, “there was no pressure that I had to turn out a Christian on the other side or even go to church.”

Herrmann represents a growing group of young people seeking spiritual guidance outside of organized religion. On the spectrum between atheism and religiosity, where people increasingly identify themselves, these “in-betweeners” want more spiritual depth than a typical therapist might offer but without theological commitments attached to meeting with clergy or some Christian counselors.

“Very rarely do we direct people what to do,” said the Rev. Lil Smith, the director of practicum for the spiritual direction program at Southern Methodist University. “We hold space for the slow, unfolding work of God through compassionate listening.”

Smith said that as the institutional church becomes more resistant to change, intentional or not, spiritual direction is increasingly becoming part of the conversation.

“It’s not just about the intellectual knowledge we have,” she said. “It’s the felt sense knowledge, the heart space.”

Herrmann’s spiritual director, Linda Serepca at Charlotte Spirituality Center, said she’s seen an increase in interest, especially from younger people who no longer attend church but still want to cultivate a spiritual life. Serepca credits the growing popularity of spiritual direction to people linking psychology and spirituality, like with the Enneagram personality test.

“If I see a psychiatrist, they may not hold space for my religious beliefs,” she said, and people talking to a pastor may feel that “all they want to do is talk about religion, and I can’t talk about the reality of my life.”

Since Charlotte Spirituality Center opened in 2010, Serepca has observed that spiritual direction has gone from being mostly about prayer life to being about all of life. While a typical question a decade ago would have been about how to pray better, today you hear, “I’m having trouble finding a job,” Serepca said.

The ministry of spiritual direction can be traced to early Christian ascetics who retreated into deserts to seek God in simple lives of prayer and fasting. Many wrote spiritual advice. Until a few decades ago, most people offering spiritual direction in the U.S. were Catholic priests. Spiritual direction has become more common in the Protestant church only over the last 10 to 20 years, according to several spiritual directors Religion News Service spoke with.

Today, spiritual direction is an umbrella term that means different things to various religious practitioners based on their training and religious background. From Indigenous religions to Buddhism to Judaism, each religion has its own variation of spiritual direction, according to the Rev. SeiFu Anil Singh-Molares, executive director of Spiritual Directors International and a Zen Buddhist priest. He defines spiritual direction at its essence as deep listening and respecting people’s agency. “We’re not trying to convert anyone,” he said.

The interest is fueling a growth of training centers around the country. Programs range from independent centers led by spiritual directors, sometimes anchored to one faith tradition and other times interreligious, to certificate programs at established seminaries such as the San Francisco Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology and Columbia Theological Seminary.

While Canada and many European countries require certification for spiritual directors, in the U.S. spiritual direction has no central governing board to license practitioners. Spiritual directors argue that if the practice were institutionalized, costs would increase for both spiritual directors and clients, making the service less accessible. Organizations such as Spiritual Directors International, an interfaith and interspiritual organization founded in 1990, try to fill this gap.

While there are several organizations that offer guiding principles for spiritual direction, most American spiritual direction programs use Spiritual Directors International’s Guidelines for Ethical Conduct as a part of their training curricula, and have for several decades now. A 2002 document from the organization stated that even back then, most training programs used the ethical guidelines in some form. Some evangelical Christian spiritual direction programs use ESDA’s code of ethics instead to guide their principles. Smith said that no matter which code of ethics a spiritual training program decides to adopt, when someone is seeking a relationship with a spiritual director, part of the initial conversation should include asking about the director’s training program and the ethical guidelines that lead and guide the director’s spiritual journey.

Singh-Molares was brought onto Spiritual Directors International eight years ago to expand the reach of spiritual direction and encourage broad religious and spiritual diversity despite its Catholic roots. The organization now offers its guidelines in English, Chinese, French, German, Korean, Norwegian and Spanish.

Today, Spiritual Directors International has over 6,800 members in 42 countries. Ninety percent are based in North America.

The organization’s second largest contingent after Christians are “spiritual independents,” which it defines as the “spiritual but not religious” or unaffiliated members. In 2016, this category hardly existed in the roster but it now makes up about 1,600 members.

“This spans from people who were formally following a religion and no longer do to young folks who are spiritually inclined but allergic to established religions for various reasons,” Singh-Molares told RNS.

In addition to Christians, the organization has Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Sikh members.

“Spiritual direction is still too much of a well-kept secret,” Singh-Molares said. “This is very much a growing movement and growing manifestation. As more people hear about it, they’re hungry for it.”

Spiritual direction also serves the religious, allowing church leaders space to wrestle with spiritual thoughts and questions in a context outside of their institutions. For the Rev. Katie Nakamura Rengers in Decatur, Alabama, spiritual direction gives her an outlet to reflect on the bigger picture of her faith when she gets caught up in the “bureaucratic ways” of her Episcopal church. While a therapist helps you get “out of the cave,” she said, a spiritual director helps you “explore the cave.”

Herrmann said the most profound part of his experience with the practice has been realizing that ordinary things he does, which may not seem spiritual on the surface, actually are. Serepca helped him see that riding his bike to an indie movie theater and listening to music have become his spiritual rituals, helping him feel connected with himself. Now he also connects with his spirituality through activities such as baking bread and doing activist work. In the spring, he was involved with the encampment on the University of Pennsylvania campus to protest the war in Gaza. “It wasn’t necessarily self-evidently a spiritual thing, even a Christian thing,” he described. “But it was something that I was connecting to my own spirituality.”

While Herrmann has lived in four cities over his six years with Serepca, their meetings, at times in person but mostly on Zoom, have remained consistent. “That, in and of itself, has been really beneficial for me,” he said. “Just to have something that feels like a spiritual habit that I get to have on a monthly basis.”