Home

Welcome to Christian Formation & Direction Ministries (CFDM) Arizona

Our mission is to cultivate spiritual formation, fostering our response to the invitation to deepen our relationship with the triune God. Our trainings, events, workshops and programs offer the opportunity to go deeper in your relationship with God, yourself and the world.

I invite you to explore our two-year certification training program in spiritual direction, as well as other workshops, events and resources offered through CFDM Arizona.

Blessings and Peace,

Joyce Vidal-Thornburg, MA, CT, CSD
Executive Director, CFDM Arizona
jvidal460@gmail.com

The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a person’s life, to get behind the face of conventional gestures and attitudes which are presented to the world, and to bring out the person’s inner spiritual freedom, his/her inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his/her soul. – Thomas Merton

I had the honor and privilege to be a part of the first CFDM Arizona Cohort, traveling from San Antonio, Texas each time! The relationships I made, the internal movement of God in my life, and the training in preparation for meeting with others in their journey with God were life changing in so many ways. I would count my two years in CFDM training as one of the major spiritual mile markers in my entire life. As I meet with others in a Spiritual Direction relationship since my completion of the training, the effects of God working through CFDM are spread to many others.

Cohort 1 Member

The discernment workshop helped me focus on the biggest question in my spiritual life: to whom do I pray? My project, which calls me to continue whether I’m ill and abed or well and about, is to pursue the faint trail of the divine feminine through the tangle of masculinized Christianity. I need a strong image of the feminine in which to heal myself and draw the energy to serve and pray for others.

From “A Time for Discernment”