For roughly 20 years now, I have been exploring questions of purpose, meaning and healing in my life. While I believe that this kind of journey never ends, my experience taught me that it is very helpful to be accompanied on that way by another explorer.
My own path led me through different stages of life and faith, starting with four years of service in the German Navy. Subsequently, I studied law and business administration at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Bielefeld, Germany, and the Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), South Africa. It was there in South Africa, a society where faith still plays a much more central role than in Western Europe today, that my quest for meaning became more focused and deliberate. In South Africa, I learned a great deal about the various branches of Christianity and, for the first time, experienced a sense of homecoming during an Eucharist service at an Anglican church.
After completing my law degree, I worked for a few years in insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings in Southern Germany. During this time, I first tried to reconnect with the Lutheran Church, in which I was baptised as an infant. But after a few years of discernment, I was received into the Roman Catholic Church and entered the postulate of the Benedictine monastery of Münsterschwarzach. Even though I learned there that a celibate life as a monk was not my way, this formative experience had an immense impact on my life and spirituality. It led me to complete a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree (Magister Theologiae) in theology, philosophy, and religious studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. It also inspired me to train as a spiritual director at Sarum College, Salisbury, UK.
At the end of my degree program in theology, I lived for nearly two years in Birmingham, UK. During a placement with the Director of Interfaith Relations for the Bishop of Birmingham, I had the chance to delve into interfaith work with Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Because of a long illness and an acquired disability, I had to put my plans of an academic career in theology at rest. But I still have an enquiring mind with a deep interest in spirituality and mysticism, monasticism, religious pluralism, history, culture, and politics.
At some point, I knew that joining the Roman Catholic Church was probably not the final stage of my journey. So I allowed myself to be drawn further and further ‘back’ to the Anglican Church, where it had all somehow begun in South Africa. Today, I am married and live with my wife and our dog in Kiel, Germany, and worship at the Anglican Church of St. Thomas à Becket in Hamburg. I combine my work as a theologian and spiritual director with working part-time at my local city council. I am a member of the networks of spiritual directors of the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe, the Lutheran Church in Northern Germany, and the London Centre for Spiritual Direction.
Stephan Jockheck 