Josh Banner 

Director

DMin Candidate Fuller Theological Seminary), Pasadena, CA.
SD Certification '14, Dominican Center at Marywood, Grand Rapids, MI.
MCS '12, Regent College, Vancouver, BC.
BA '97Literature & Philosophy, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

Josh Banner is a certified spiritual director, a retreat leader, musician, teacher, and is currently the director of the Invitation, a spirituality center that creates time and space for God at the vital intersection of contemplation and justice.

Josh has served extensively in local churches and schools in the arenas of art, culture, theology, prayer, and worship. His greatest honor and delight is facilitating contemplative prayer and group spiritual direction with his friends in the EC Brooks Correctional Facility in Muskegon, Michigan, a practice he began in 2015. This immersion in the prison has led Josh to advocate for spiritual direction as a healing response to the wounds of America’s original sin of racism.

Previously, Josh served as the Minister of Music and Art in campus ministry at Hope College where he also taught as an adjunct professor in the Studies in Ministry Minor degree program and oversaw the campus recording studios in collaboration with the music department.
Eight and a half years of recruiting and mentoring 40+ student leaders to help him lead four weekly, non-compulsory worship services at the small Christian liberal arts college exposed an inner poverty within Josh that compelled him to seek the help of spiritual direction and to eventually realize direction as his deeper vocation.

After completing his certification in spiritual direction with the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, he began his doctoral studies at Fuller Seminary and continued for several years to teach classes and offer retreats through Dominican Center at Marywood. Three years facilitating the 19th Annotation of St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in a group format with the nuns would especially prove to influence how Josh approaches spiritual formation through the Invitation.

In 2017 Josh founded the Invitation as a nonprofit to support and organize his practice of spiritual direction between the prison and the local church along with the Invitation Podcast, a series of guided prayers and meditations and spiritual conversations. The Invitation has grown to host the School of Prayer, a study and practice of the rule of life, and the School of Contemplative Listening, a certification practicum in spiritual direction. These formation experiences began to take shape in 2019 just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and have served almost 60 people in their first three years. Both are inspired by the prison practices and are at their core confessional in the mode of 12-step addiction recovery groups.

Josh and his wife, poet Susanna Childress, and their three children, Casper, Shepherd, and Merritt live in Holland MI.