Jim McInnes | Ministry Sabbatical, Mid-Life Transition and Becoming a Spiritual Director

An SGM Interview with Jim McInnes
Spiritual Direction and Mid-Life Transition

Jim McInnes is the newly appointed Associate Pastor at St Augustine’s in Auckland, lectures in Christian spirituality at Carey Baptist College and is a Spiritual Director with a particular interest in accompanying people in vocational Christian ministry. In this blogpost, Kathryn Overall has a conversation with Jim about his formation as a spiritual director during a ministry sabbatical and the gifts that are emerging out of the deep soul-work of journeying through a mid-life transition.

Jim, what drew you to becoming a spiritual director?

Experience of God, questions of faith, and the twists and turns of individual spiritual journeys has always intrigued me. I’m quite reflective by nature. I enjoy exploring the depths of my own interior world in dialogue with God, and I find it very fulfilling to help others take an inward journey with God also. Not that spirituality is only interior, but a certain attentiveness to our inner world is part of an authentic relationship with God.

After years of various kinds of vocational Christian ministry (church, mission, theological education) I knew that deep one to one spiritual conversations was an aspect of ministry that I loved and wanted to take further. Training as a spiritual director was a natural extension for me.

What was going on in your life at the time you chose to begin this formation journey? 

I’m 52 years old. Coming out of six years of leadership in an international church in Hong Kong, and 27 years of vocational ministry in general, I felt the need in 2020 for what you might call a mid-life integration and transition season.

I sensed God invited me to take a two-year sabbatical from Christian leadership roles, while training as a spiritual director. I knew that to simply throw myself into the next full-time ministry context would be to delay some important internal work in my own life, and hamper my own spiritual and emotional growth.

So, with fear and trembling, I quietly stepped back from ministry functions that I strongly identified with (leadership and teaching) to let God poke around inside me. It was brutal and beautiful. I’ve shed quite a few tears in the past two years as God has led me deeper into my own soul and touched fragmented parts of my being that needed attention.

My profound inner journey has dovetailed well with spiritual direction training and practice. I can empathise with the struggle directees face in opening up to God, but hold hope for them as God whispers to the deepest, most fragmented or lost parts of their soul.

What have been some of the dynamics of this transition time? What have you been letting go of? What has been emerging?

I lost a loving father to cancer at age 14. That experience upended a very real childhood faith in God. Ten years later God helped me release anger, unlock buried grief, and answer a clear call to Christian ministry. All that sounds wonderful, and in many ways it was, but the 24 year old man who now had a sense of purpose (ministry) and had found a new father (God) just couldn’t quite accept that he was fully loved.

I distinctly remember saying to myself and to God, even in my mid-thirties, that I knew I hungered for love and at the same time resisted it, because I couldn’t accept that I was loved unconditionally. Who can fathom why we say such things to ourselves? Inner wounds lie beneath all sorts of harmful self-beliefs and defence-mechanisms.

As you can imagine, that belief didn’t do me much good, nor did it help my marriage. It wasn’t all bleak. In many respects ministry and marriage have been healthy and happy dimensions of life. However, lingering un-resolved issues have a way of bubbling to the surface. Last year I sat in a counsellor’s office confessing all the ways I hide from love, and finally seeing that I was ready to say: “I’m loved.” A lot shifted for me last year.

This year the inner journey has revolved around releasing the need to order, complete and control things in life in order to feel emotionally safe. It’s too soon to say, but hopefully this present mid-life journey of healing and self-acceptance will result in a greater measure of freedom and integration that feeds into ministry, marriage, and all of life.

What have been the gifts of being part of the SGM Spiritual Directors Formation Programme?

The companionship of fellow trainees on workshop days and retreats has been wonderful. I have felt part of a community that is full of wisdom, warmth and grace. The content of the formation programme and the skills that we acquire through spiritual direction practice and supervision are invaluable. The professional learning, self-reflection, and feedback through supervision is rigorous, and has refined the way I listen to people and to God in spiritual conversations.

I have learned the paradoxical balance of exercising restraint on the one hand, by saying very little a times in a spiritual direction meeting, while trusting my spiritual instincts on the other hand, and being prepared to frame a question or comment based on a discerning thought or nudge to help a directee go deeper. That’s an art that I’m practicing.

What have you wrestled with?  What new insights are you integrating? 

There is a teacher in me that I have had to suppress to a significant extent to order to offer good spiritual direction. Having said that, there are moments where I can help put language around something for a directee, or help them make a connection from their own thoughts and experience to a concept of God by drawing on that teaching gift.

I have wrestled a lot with how a teaching gift can appropriately be integrated with effective spiritual direction without taking the lead from the directee or putting words in their mouth. Spiritual insights are predominantly for directees to receive directly from God, not to be offered by the spiritual director. This makes spiritual direction challenging for me at times. I want to jump in with all manner of insights.

Early in my training I had to tie the teacher up in the corner and gag him. Slowly I’ve learned to release him at moments where a comment, observation or question can shed light on something for a directee. Then I have to tie him up again!

Where to from here?

This year I have lectured in Christian spirituality for Carey Baptist College while completing my spiritual direction training. That has been a lovely combination. The academic role has forced me further into the literature, theory and practice around Christian spirituality, and confronted me with a diverse array of students asking excellent and varied questions that relate to spirituality, just as spiritual directees do. The convergence is terrific. And, of course, the teacher in me can be untied for a few hours each week – which I love.

I’m also heading back into church ministry and leadership (in 2023) after two years away from it. I feel ready again to face the challenges of church leadership and pastoral ministry as Associate Pastor for St. Augustine’s, an Anglican church in Auckland. The church has me for 3.5 days/week. I have reserved a day for academic work, and half a day for spiritual direction work. I’m looking forward to the balance and cross-pollination of those three ministry domains.

What excites you about the possibilities ahead as you integrate your practice as a spiritual director with re-engagement with church leadership and teaching?

Churches too often attempt spiritual formation (discipleship) en mass without paying attention to where individual believers are at, and how we all relate to God in different ways. I want to help churches consider ways to foster spiritual formation through means that are more tailored to individuals, without overlooking the community as a whole. For example, church members could be taught some basic principles and practices of spiritual friendship, and encouraged to walk with one another in a safe, sensitive and spiritually supportive way.

I’m also aware that spiritual direction is sometimes practiced at arms-length from churches, for understandable reasons. However, I would like to work at the intersection of church ministry and spiritual direction. I feel the two should be in constant dialogue and respectfully learning from each other.

That’s interesting. What would you hope they could learn from one another?

Directees frequently reflect on their experience of church (positive and negative) and the impact Christian community has on their relationship with God. There is much that church pastors can learn from spiritual directors about what’s helpful and what’s damaging for believers in church life. But, because the spiritual life cannot be fully lived in insolation from Christian community, spiritual direction will also help directees reflect on the important role of healthy Christian community in nurturing faith.

Spiritual directors can help directees prepare to re-engage with church life if they have detached, and come to terms with the imperfections of Christian community, which simply reflects the human imperfections that we all wrestle with in our own lives, and are hopefully learning to have some grace for. 

Who do you feel drawn to accompanying as a spiritual director?

People in vocational Christian ministry in the church and the charity sector have some unique spiritual direction concerns. I feel drawn to spiritually accompany people working for churches, Christian NGO’s, and mission organisations – not exclusively, but to a certain extent. The way personal spirituality and a sense of calling to Christian ministry play into each other and complicate each other interests me. I understand some of the stresses, disappointments, hopes, joys and soul-searching identity concerns that accompany vocational Christian ministry. I think I have something to offer people in that space.

In the midst of my recent sabbatical I sensed God say to me: “You don’t have to minster Jim. I love you.” A weight lifted off me, and I felt a shot of joy.

To remember again that we are loved by God for who we are, not for our faithful labour or our fulfilment of a particular calling, can be powerfully liberating. Every believer needs of course to know that the love of God is not transactional and doesn’t depend on their performance; but people in vocational Christian ministry can especially lose sight of this fact. And, they can find it difficult to say “I’m struggling spiritually.”

I want to partner with God in helping such people.