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We desire to serve the Australian spiritual direction community by:

  • encouraging spiritual direction formation programs;
  • promoting local and national events;
  • linking spiritual directors with regional and national associations;
  • advising people who are looking for a spiritual director how to find a director near them.

About us

Our Vision

Spiritual direction seeks to listen the life-giving presence of God into articulation within the individual and the faith community.

We believe that the spiritual journey is unique to each person and that God fashions and transforms according to the secret call within us.

The ministry of spiritual direction is a sacred trust, calling for the highest standards of formation, practice and accountability.

The Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction welcomes the ministry of spiritual directors who belong to the different Christian traditions in which Christ continues to minister through his Spirit.

Our Mission

The AECSD seeks to serve the spiritual direction community of Australia.

Our goal is to support and foster the prophetic dimension inherent in the ministry of spiritual direction which calls attention to the presence of God in all of life. This prophetic ministry calls for a practical lived response to that presence in ways that are just, reconciling and healing for all people and the whole of creation.

We work toward this goal by:

  • recommending guidelines to foster, support, and recognise the formation of spiritual directors
  • promoting ethical guidelines
  • supporting associations of spiritual directors
  • providing opportunities for conversation among formators and among other groups within the community of spiritual directors
  • encouraging the ongoing personal, spiritual, and professional development of spiritual directors.

What Spiritual Direction Is

Spiritual direction is a ministry in which one person, the spiritual director, helps another, the directee, become more aware of God’s self-communication in his or her life, respond to that self-communication, and live out the gifts of that relationship.

Spiritual direction is a ministry in the Church concerned with facilitating a person’s growth in intimacy with God which leads, as a consequence, to right relationship with all creation. The ministry has a long and revered history in the Christian tradition and has been practiced by lay people, vowed religious and ordained ministers.

Recent activities

The AECSD council meets three times a year.

Our recent activities have been to visit several Spiritual Direction Formation programs as part of the process of recognising or re-recognising these programs.

2021 was the national gathering Communion in Diversity

The AECSD code of Ethics has been revised and updated in March 2019.

AECSD also responds to requests about such issues as insurance and mandatory reporting – see relevant pages on the AECSD website, Mandatory Reporting and Insurance.