What Spiritual Direction Is — and Why Every Pastor Needs One

Most pastors know accountability partners, mentors, coaches, and counselors. Fewer know spiritual directors — and those who do often carry a vague sense that it is a Catholic practice, an ancient practice, something for people with a more contemplative temperament than the busy evangelical pastor with a sermon to finish and fifteen things on the agenda.

Spiritual direction is none of these other things. It is a specific kind of relationship — one of the oldest in the Christian tradition — in which a more experienced companion helps a person pay attention to what God is doing in their life. To notice the movements of the Spirit that ordinary busyness tends to obscure. To respond to God with greater freedom and intentionality. The spiritual director's primary question is not "what are you doing?" but "what is God doing in you?"

Why Pastors Need It Differently

The pastoral role creates a specific spiritual hazard: the substitution of religious work for genuine interior life. The pastor is so surrounded by the vocabulary, practices, and institutional structures of faith that genuine spiritual formation can be obscured by ministerial busyness in ways that are hard to detect from the inside. The pastor reads the Bible, but primarily for sermon content. The pastor prays, but primarily in public and for others. The pastor attends worship, but from the front, in a role, managing multiple things simultaneously. None of this substitutes for the genuine, unhurried, self-forgetful attention to God's work in the pastor's own soul that a spiritual director is specifically trained to facilitate.

"The spiritual director's primary question is not 'what are you doing?' but 'what is God doing in you?' — a question most pastors are rarely asked."

What a Session Actually Looks Like

A spiritual direction session typically lasts sixty to ninety minutes and meets monthly. It begins in silence and prayer. The directee is then invited to share what has been most alive in their spiritual life since the last session — a prayer that moved them, a Scripture passage that surfaced repeatedly, a moment of unexpected grace, a place of resistance or dryness. The director listens far more than they speak, asking occasional questions not to fix or advise but to help the directee pay deeper attention to what is already present.

The director is not there to be impressed by the pastor's theological competence or led by their usual gifts. They are there to notice the stirrings of the Spirit in an ordinary human life and gently surface them. Pastors who have experienced this often describe it as one of the most disorienting and ultimately most freeing relationships in their lives — disorienting because no one in their world treats them this way, and freeing for exactly the same reason. Spiritual Directors International maintains a directory of trained directors. Look for someone with formal training, experience directing ministry leaders, and genuine relationship with the God they are trying to help you notice.