Tag: New Apostolic Reformation

Deeper Waters Podcast 8/18/2018: Holly Pivec and Doug Geivett

What’s coming up? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So your church has a new leader there. He seems like a good guy, but he’s extremely charismatic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some people have that kind of personality. The pastor you’ve always had sure seems to listen to him a lot.

This guy also has a fascination with miracles. It looks like for him, we’re on the edge of a great precipice. We’re at an age where something great is going to happen and it’s going to depend on us. We need to be doing the work of the Spirit here displayed in miracles. This is a miracle age.

And his word seems to be taken extremely seriously. Everything that he says is taken as gospel. He doesn’t really like to be questioned. Not only that, he’s not just at your church. He’s at several churches around you. It’s like he has this power over all of them.

He tells people how to spend their finances and what to do with education and what to do about marriage. Maybe in that last area, there could even be hints of impropriety. Ever since this guy came to your church, it looks like your church is about something else instead of preaching the gospel of Christ.

What’s going on?

It could be that your church has fallen victim to the New Apostolic Reformation. (NAR) This is a group of people insisting that they are apostles and that apostles are for today and your church cannot be in the fullness of faith without an apostle. There will also likely be prophets coming along for the ride as well encouraging the people in what they ought to do and not do.

Unfortunately, this is not harmless. There are plenty of people that have had their lives wrecked because they sat under the guidance of these people and their voice was treated as the voice of God. Fortunately, two people have done the work of equipping us to deal with them. They are Holly Pivec and Douglas Geivett. I don’t have the information for Geivett yet, but I can tell you about Pivec.

According to her bio:

Holly Pivec is co-author with Doug Geivett of two books on the New Apostolic Reformation or NAR, for short. She operates a popular blog on NAR, called Spirit of Error (www.spiritoferror.org). She’s a sought-after expert on NAR and has been interviewed by many high-profile media sources, including Religion News Association and the Washington Post. She has a master’s degree in Christian apologetics from Biola University.

We’ll be talking about this movement that has affected so many churches in America and around the world and what can be done about it. How do you know if your church has been affected by it and if so, what can you do about it? I hope you’ll be listening to the next episode of the Deeper Waters Podcast on this topic. As always, please go on iTunes also and leave a positive review for the Deeper Waters Podcast.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: God’s Super-Apostles

What do I think of Holly Pivec and Douglas Geivett’s book published by Weaver? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Sometimes Christians get caught up in ideas I consider sensational. Many Christians think they need to be listening for the voice of God and finding God’s will for their lives. I disagree with them, but I don’t think they’re getting into something that’s overly dangerous. Yet at the same time, could there be extreme forms? What if you think you need to go to a specific person to know what God has to say and find out what you should do? What if that person thinks they have a superior level of authority with a superior title?

Pivec and Geivett have written about a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. In this movement, people have risen up calling themselves apostles and prophets. They often claim to work miracles. They see themselves as a sort of end times fulfillment and that they are restoring the church with the offices of apostles and prophets.

Unfortunately, that has also left chaos behind it. People are following these leaders and hanging on their every word. You might think that this is one person leading one church. No. These people are often over a network of churches. Some of those networks can contain thousnads of churches all of them heeding the beck and call of one man.

Maybe here in America we might not see it so much around us, but there are other countries in the world where these kinds of people are rising up. They are becoming what Christianity is to those who have not heard the Gospel before. This can lead to exploitation as well if done wrongly. After all, greed and sexual lust are something that can hit anyone.

This book is a good and brief introduction to the movement. The authors tell you who the leaders are and what they believe in their own words. They also tell you the Scriptural passages that these people use in order to convince people that they are the real deal.

The writers will then look at those claims and provide a solid response from Scripture. They work to show that a Scripture is being misunderstood or used outside of its context. Fortunately, these people do not have many Bible verses that they can use.

They also include accounts of people who have been burned by the new movement. These are testimonials of those who trusted in an apostle or prophet and lost. Sometimes this can also lead to a division within families where one person believes the new movement and the others don’t. The movement is essentially cultic in nature.

The book also includes words of warning for others. Parents and youth have a section dedicated to them. What if you are a young person who is hearing about one of these leaders? What if you are the parent of someone who is a teenager or college age? There’s also a section for pastors. What can you do to prepare your own flock in case one of these people comes? It’s better to be prepared beforehand than have to deal with the problem when it arises.

I found the work to be very eye-opening. We can often look at the sensationalists we see on TV and we know about them. These people are not always the ones who are there and even if they’re not as common over here, they are around the world and the church needs to be ready to present real Christianity in an age of fakes.

In Christ,
Nick Peters