ABOUT MIKE CAVEN
Mike Caven has been in full time ministry for over thirty years. This website is born out of his personal journey into wholeness in Christ. Mike’s passion is to help his brothers in Christ embrace their true identities of being a beloved son of an amazing Father and walking in their full inheritance, free from the bondages of sexual sin.

Having a global world view, Mike’s visionary gifting is being employed by embracing the power of the world wide web to reach as many of his brothers in the Lord to help them walk in the freedom that Jesus paid for at the cross. Thus this website.

Mike married his wife Pat in 1982 and they have one adult son.

Mike’s Testimony
My testimony is laced with words from scripture and stories of God’s power. Words like overcame, power, victory, freedom and healing are all apart of my life. However, my journey also contains the words struggles and failures, again and again. Therefore the painful realities of my struggles show up in my story. The good news is: God! He is a redeeming God and He can turn all things together for good. That’s the best part of this testimony, the unconditional love and power of God to transform lives, to transform me.

Ever since I can remember I lived in two worlds, my outer world where I would socially interact with my family, friends and classmates and my secret inner world where I was consumed with lust and masturbation. I became a master at keeping this other world hidden from those around me. Included in that inner world of mine was an attraction to men. I now know that God was always trying to tell me that He knew all about me and He always loved me and wanted me to be his son.

As a teenager I was a loner and had very few friends. Since I wasn’t connecting sexually with real people, I cultivated lust through sexual fantasies occasional pornography and masturbation. Connecting with another guy sexually seldom happened. But I was consumed with lust. I was addicted. I maintained an image at school. I had girlfriends, but they never had my heart. I was incapable of true intimacy because I was paralyzed with severe rejection issues and a great fear of anyone having authority over me. Getting drunk on lust is how I coped with reality. Lust was how I dealt with shame, and how I dealt with self-hatred. Lust medicated the pain yet lust created more pain. That’s addiction. I couldn’t see myself beyond my homosexual orientation. I believed it was the center of who I was.

Shortly after high school, I joined the Navy and kept my double life alive. I was accustomed to this life and knew no other and even enjoyed the insanity of leading a double life. After the Navy, I moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. I heard stories about Christians living on a nearby island. I found myself wanting to connect with these Christians. Keep in mind, I had not altered any of my issues in my life, they were all still very much alive.

Almost immediately, I traveled to the other island and found these Christians. I started attending their church. I told them of my homosexual orientation and they tried delivering me. I heard their testimonies and it seemed to me that most people had an intense encounter with God, like getting hit with a bolt of lightening and instantly there was a radical transformation in their life. Does God do this? Yes! Did He do it that way for me? No! No bolt of lightening, no instant transformation. My lusting, my homosexuality, the drinking, drugs and smoking continued. In my case it was not some evil spirit — it was me, my flesh. They failed in their attempt of delivering me, but Jesus had a beachhead in my heart and He does not believe in retreating!

These Hawaiian believers did love God and that is what attracted me to them. They also loved me. Sitting under anointed bible teaching, I became aware that my sexual addiction was sin and that Jesus hated all sin. Some, just some, of those Christians tried to “help Jesus” hate my sin, especially my homosexuality. They wanted me to become “healed” of it with the end result being I would emerge a heterosexual. Those encounters were not easy.

As I said earlier, I greatly feared people in authority. So, in my mind the pastors of this church community qualified as people to fear. I once remember going out and sinning sexually. I returned to the church, confessed and repented. I was quite open about what I had just done. Even though I had repented, there were church leaders who wanted to kick me out. But this one pastor did something that was vital to my walk with the Lord. He took me out to breakfast and just loved me. I stayed with this fellowship because of those who showed me love.

From Hawaii I moved to Colorado to join my brother in his plumbing business. I also joined a wonderful small church. Once again God had placed me in a community of people who showed me His truth, grace and love. It was during this time that I stopped acting out sexually with men. After an encounter with a guy, I sank into a 6 week depression. It was like God saying to me “no more.” I knew every time I would privately ask God to forgive me or if I chose to open up to a brother in Christ, I knew I was forgiven. But I was learning to face the consequences of sinning. My God always removed the guilt from me whenever I confessed my sin to Him at the cross of Jesus, but the consequences, those were another matter. The consequence for me was living in a never-ending cycle of self-hatred and shame. I now look back at this time and am amazed at the patience of God towards me. I did not deserve it but I am eternally grateful to Him for it.

Through a series of what seem to have been divine events, I traveled to England in 1980 to do a discipleship training school with Youth With A Mission (YWAM). After the school, I moved to Amsterdam and joined the construction crew and put plumbing in an old building that YWAM had purchased. I found myself with about 65 passionate, committed young people as we renovated this building and ran training schools. Through the work I was doing and the Christian community, I was once again immersed in a great vat of God’s Love. But this time, right out the front door was my other utopia--the Red Light District. I was in great conflict.

I attended daily bible studies with praise and worship and wonderful fellowship. Yet, as I said right out the door was this Red Light District. The pornography was openly displayed in storefront windows. You did not have to go into the shops. Pornography of all kinds was everywhere. My two worlds were colliding, but God’s grace was also upon me. I never fell. The love I received from the community was like an anchor in my soul, an anchor that kept me grounded in God’s love and His grace to walk in obedience to Him.

While in Europe, I was also corresponding with a girl I had met on my way there. I had no intentions of going further than just being friends but God had other plans. My future wife, Pat, had then and still has a great love for God, which was the first reason I was attracted to her. I went back and spent a year in the States. While I was open and honest with her about my past and current struggles and she with me, neither one of us knew how to anticipate what our healing journeys would look like in the future. We knew however, with trust in God, we would support each other in our journeys. We were married in 1982, before returning to Amsterdam.

Early on in our marriage we lived in the Red Light District for a year. Seven doors down from our tiny apartment was the Satanist church and we often shopped alongside the witches from that church. We had the grace of God on us while we were living there. Two weeks before our scheduled move to a new neighborhood, His grace lifted and for those remaining weeks it was an incredibly oppressive place to live. But we saw this as God’s way of affirming that His grace is sufficient for anywhere or anything He has called us to. We stayed in Amsterdam for 10 years as part of that mission community. And remember that small church in Colorado? They took care of us financially for those 10 years.

Amazingly, the Christian community was present in the Red Light District. Yes, God had His people there. YWAM and a variety of awesome Dutch ministries are doing work there that most Christians would not touch with a ten foot pole. The light of the gospel shines brightly in the darkness. In fact, recently, many of the former prostitute windows have closed and are now shop windows, displaying mannequins with clothes on.

A very important piece of my story is that through circumstances that I am convinced was God, we adopted a 4-month-old baby boy in 1986. I never intended to be married nor did the thought of being a father ever enter my mind, yet when we seek first the kingdom of God, all good things will be added unto us. I am eternally blessed and grateful for both my wife and my son.

We continued to serve God. In 1992 we relocated to Atlanta, Georgia and took over a small ministry helping Christians concerning the topic of homosexuality in their lives. I worked with the guys and Pat worked with the girls. For 10 years, every project we put our hand to was blessed by God. We would plan outreaches into the gay community that were very effective. We were so successful that the largest gay magazine in America did a six-page spread on our ministry. They sent a reporter to go undercover, posing as a Christian who wanted help with unwanted same sex attractions. I met with him several times and he attended the small group I ran. After I discovered that he was a reporter, he asked to meet with the group for one last time. I agreed and those who wanted to meet with him did. While the article did not at all agree with our goals, it wasn’t hostile and the undercover reporter even wrote that he missed the guys in the group. We hosted several conferences and seminars on sexual purity. Pat directed the Living Waters program for 14 years, mentored and trained leaders to run their own Living Waters program. We interviewed over 100 men and women who left the homosexual lifestyle, also parents of children in the lifestyle and aired these testimonies weekly for six years on a local Christian T V station.

My issues concerning lust and porn greatly subsided to the point that I would have seasons where I experienced great freedom. And then there would be times where I would almost question my salvation. My journey has not been flawless. But I never gave up. I never compromised. I would always call sin-sin. And when I would fall into sin, I would confess it to a brother in Christ whom I trusted and refocus on God. I strongly believe that you cannot experience any lasting breakthroughs without a healthy Christian community and one, two or three brothers in Christ that you can trust are honest and transparent with and who will point you to the Cross of Jesus Christ.

A major victory for me was the revelation of how my Heavenly Father views me. It was A. W. Tozer who said:

“We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.”

This website is for all Christian men. Making sure that this site is secure has been a very high priority so that men can develop deeply honest and transparent relationships with other brothers who also long to walk in holiness and purity. Given our modern lifestyle, the Internet can be used for so much good, if one can be assured that what they share can’t be viewed by others. Well, that is exactly what Purity 101 is – a very secure and safe place to be radically honest with brothers in Christ and to be guided to the source of all freedom, Jesus Christ. This material is laid out irrespective of one's sexual preference and is Christ-centered and biblically based. It is intended to help you properly address and resolve the heart issues that fuel lust, masturbation and pornography. It is to help you become clean and pure before our Heavenly Father no matter what your expression of sin may be. I am totally convinced that if you apply what is here, God will enable you to take control of your own sex drive.

I want to leave you with this scripture for this is my hope for you.

We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God. Psalm 20:5

Blessings and Success
Your Brother in Christ

Mike