Dave Janvier

Dave began college as a business major thinking that God was calling him into the world of finance. Tragically, Dave’s father passed away suddenly during his last year at Asbury College. He moved back home to Wilmington, Delaware with his family. “That sort of disrupted my sense of God and call because it seemed like my whole world was turned upside down,” Dave says.

Suffering and Spaces to Heal: A Shift Toward Counseling

However, from the experience of his dad’s passing, Dave started to wonder how people handle suffering and how one could create spaces for people to heal. He met his wife on a Christian college and career retreat in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and got married in 1997. Shortly after, he began working jobs in the business sector. “I totally hated them and it led to this big period of depression,” Dave says. He began to think that a business career was not for him.

Around that time, he and his wife took a lay counseling program through their church and began counseling people. As opposed to the business jobs, Dave found the counseling nourishing to his soul and stirring passion within him. Additionally, considering his own suffering and trauma from his father’s passing, Dave began to perceive a need within the church that he could help meet. “What is this way that we as a church can be equipped to really hold space for suffering?” Dave says. “I think at many times in the church, we have a challenge with developing a good, healthy theology of suffering.”

Pursuing Counseling and Sex Therapy Certification

Dave returned to school to study counseling. After getting his degree, Dave jumped into the field. However, the state of Pennsylvania, where he now lived, required him to have a few more course credits before awarding him licensure. Providentially, he discovered a sex therapy certification at the graduate level through the Institute for Sexual Wholeness. “When I was doing the lay counseling, I saw a lot of issues around sexuality, such as sexual abuse, compulsive sexual behavior, sex addiction, betrayal, trauma, infidelity,” Dave says. “At the time, I didn’t feel equipped on how to address those issues.”

The additional certification allowed him to gain the hours needed for Pennsylvania licensure while opening the door to meet a growing mental health and spiritual need in the church. “The need has exploded exponentially with kids becoming exposed younger and younger to pornographic images on the internet…”, Dave says. “Then we see in the news, within a lot of Christian churches, fallen pastors that have gotten caught up in sexual issues.”

The D.Min. at Asbury Seminary: Integration of Spiritual Formation

Dave worked many years as a practicing counselor before he saw an advertisement for the Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) in Spiritual Direction program at Asbury Seminary. Initially, he wasn’t sure if he was called to do a doctorate, but he eventually called the Seminary to inquire about the program. Before he knew it, Dave was accepted a week before classes began. After 20 years of clinical work and professional research integrating theology and spirituality, the D.Min. program helped Dave put his work into a model and framework. “That was really, really helpful for me to do,” Dave says. “A lot of what I was trying to do is to convey if we’re spiritually whole then we’re going to be sexually whole.”

Dave’s research thesis focused on men with sexual issues and their spirituality. He found a connection between men with sexual issues and a lack of a felt sense of God, as opposed to a mere cognitive sense of God. “Sex addiction is often called an intimacy disorder. ‘I don’t know how to do intimacy with people,’ but also that gets projected onto God,” Dave says. “So what I invited the guys do was a 12-week intervention where each week I presented a topic around sexuality and addiction and spiritual formation, but led them through an experience, a spiritual practice that allowed them to have a felt sense to be known by God.”

SIIMDA Soul Care and Equipping the Church

Dave’s research discovered that the amount in which the men acted out on their sexual issues decreased as a result of the intervention process. This combination of psychology, neuroscience, theology, and spirituality developed from his D.Min. dissertation led to Dave founding SIIMDA Soul Care, a trauma-informed therapeutic and pastoral healing modality. Dave offers training for individuals to become certified SIIMDA Soul Care ministers to equip them to bring healing to their churches and communities. He has been asked to speak to groups of pastors and church leaders and is also developing a curriculum to enable them to create spaces for sexual healing and wholeness.

Equipping pastors and Christian leaders marks the next stage of Dave’s vocation. “The church is called to be the healing presence of God in the world, but what I find is that the workers are few,” Dave says. “And so my passion is to be able to equip others to do this kind of work.”