By Andrea Bailey Willits
Embracing the profound resonance between spiritual direction and Anglican spirituality, Sally Breedlove co-founded Selah Anglican, a contemplative formation program in the Anglican tradition.
Ducks glide across a pond, all calm surface and frantic underwater effort.
For decades, Sally Breedlove lived the same way.
“I could do a lot,” she says. “I could mother five kids, I could teach, I could speak at retreats, I could show up at a party after arguing with [my husband] Steve and look completely composed. But the inside—that quiet—was missing.”
Her turning point arrived in her 40s, during a period when “life didn’t work the way I thought it was going to work.” The Breedloves had uprooted their family to Canada for Steve’s ministry. Her teenagers were furious. Moreover, the solid architecture of theological certainty she had relied on for decades suddenly felt insufficient.
So she went looking for language to describe what she was experiencing. At Regent College in Vancouver, she enrolled in a course taught by James Houston, one of the college’s founders and a pioneer in integrating Christian spirituality with academic theology. In his opening lecture, he spoke about the heart.
“Not emotions, not intellect,” Sally says, “but this deep core of us that connects to God.”
She kept returning to Regent for week-long courses separated by stretches of mothering and ministry. In one course on the Desert Fathers, she encountered the line that has become something of a mantra for her:
Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
Her professor translated it this way: “If you are with yourself long enough in a place quiet enough, you will discover what is true.”
Eventually she met a woman trained in spiritual direction—someone whose presence felt like what she had been searching for all along. “Around her was an ocean of peace,” Sally recalls.
Their conversations sparked the beginnings of a ministry called JourneyMates, a contemplative community offering small groups and silent retreats. People began asking Sally to be their spiritual director.
“Part of me thought, I’m making this up as I go along,” she said. “I needed training.”
That search led her to Selah, a spiritual direction program of the parachurch ministry Leadership Transformations. Its director, Susan Currie, became a friend and collaborator. Sally joined the faculty and eventually became associate director, helping the curriculum deepen over time.
“It was not about offering people answers,” Sally says. “It was about creating interior space to receive someone, to receive God.”
Spiritual direction became for Sally a counter-rhythm to the noise of church and culture. A refusal to rush. A rediscovery of mystery. “I didn’t have to convince someone of anything. My job was not to fix. It was to accompany.”
Anglicanism, which she and Steve embraced in midlife, reinforced that posture of accompaniment.
“Anglican spirituality understands that formation is broader and more mysterious than having a good quiet time or hearing a strong sermon,” she says. “We are shaped by Scripture, by the Eucharist, by prayer, by the rhythms of a tradition much older than us. It frees us from believing it’s all up to us.”
From Vision to Partnership
Sally crossed paths with Bishop Jeff Bailey in the Diocese of Christ Our Hope, where he served under her husband, Bishop Steve, as Canon for Leadership Development. Bishop Jeff approached Sally with a vision for Anglican churches training their own spiritual directors, and the idea resonated immediately. He wanted every ordinand to have access to contemplative companionship—a listening way of life woven into the fabric of a diocese.
But when he suggested writing a program from scratch, Sally hesitated.
“I told him, ‘Jeff, it will take us five years to refine anything we start,’” she recalls.
Instead, a partnership was forged with Leadership Transformations—the organizational home of the original Selah program. Together Sally and Jeff launched Selah Anglican, with Sally serving as associate director and Jeff as one of the inaugural participants.
It was a perfect fit. Both Anglicanism and spiritual direction trust that God meets people through more than ideas alone: through the way sunlight falls through tree branches, through the ancient words of the Creed spoken in unison, through the silent space of listening prayer. Both Anglicanism and spiritual direction emphasize quieting our hearts to listen.
For pastors and church planters in C4SO—who often carry the weight of pioneering work and the particular isolation that comes with leadership—Selah Anglican offers something rare: a space to be accompanied rather than to lead, to receive rather than to give, to remember that the renewal of all things begins with the renewal of our own hearts.
“Our tradition already knows that formation is communal, sacramental, embodied,” Sally says. “Spiritual direction simply helps us remember.”
The Quiet That Sustains
Sally, who once tried to hold it all together with effort and achievement, now welcomes life with the settled heart of someone who has spent years listening in the silence.
This is the work she and Bishop Jeff hope to offer to C4SO clergy: a space to remember who they are beneath all they do. As we grow together as a diocese—planting churches, making disciples, joining God’s work of renewal—clergy need more than strategies and techniques. They need the kind of interior spaciousness Sally describes, the quiet that makes sustainable ministry possible.
If you’re a clergy member interested in exploring Selah Anglican for the 2027-2029 cohort, reach out to Sally to begin a conversation.
Want to learn more about spiritual direction? Visit C4SO’s Spiritual Directors page.
Sally Breedlove is the co-founder of JourneyMates, a contemplative ministry that invites people to connect with the Triune God in community. She and her husband Steve, a Bishop in the Anglican Church in North America, live among five married children and 15 grandchildren.