# Holly Pivec — Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus? **Summary.** A YouTube interview (published 2026-07-13) in which [[Holly Pivec]] talks with the biblical counselor behind *Reminded* — the same guest as [[2026-06-28-pivec-nar-anxiety-biblical-counselor|Holly Pivec — Is NAR Theology Fueling Your Anxiety? (EP 35)]] — about how [[New Apostolic Reformation]] teaching consumes attention. The distinctive contribution is a *distraction* argument rather than a doctrinal one: NAR does not merely teach error, it keeps people so busy with spiritual-warfare tasks that the gospel gets crowded out. The episode's exegetical anchor is Martha in Luke 10, and its sharpest claim is Pivec's: that NAR treats the cross as *incomplete* unless it also secures dominion. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus|Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus]]) --- ## Key Claims 1. **The control/entrust distinction is the mental-health hinge.** The counselor frames daily life as sorting what a person controls from what they do not, then entrusting the rest to God. Anxiety and depression show up, he argues, precisely where someone tries to control what they cannot — "it's kind of like where you get too close to a fire… that's what it's telling you that you don't control this." He guards both flanks: the answer is not passivity ("I trust God that money's going to show up in my bank account") either. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus|Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus]]) 2. **NAR inverts that sorting.** The charge is that NAR expands the "what I control" column without limit — rebuke the hurricane, change the city, change the person — and so manufactures the exact conditions the counselor identifies as anxiety-producing. He notes NAR would likely not concede even the most obvious limit: "you can't change another person." (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus|Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus]]) 3. **Failure carries no cost.** "We're going to rebuke that hurricane." And it never happens. "And there's no ever really any consequences for that for them." This is the accountability gap the wiki tracks under [[Fallible Prophecy]], surfacing here as a *mental-health* claim rather than a doctrinal one — the prediction fails, the system absorbs it, and the believer keeps paying the cost of trying. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus|Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus]]) 4. **Martha as the governing text.** Luke 10: Martha is "cumbered about with much serving" — one translation — or "distracted," another. The counselor reads her as doing something *good* while being pulled from what mattered, and notes the Greek describes her as driven about mentally. The turn that gives the episode its title: she was distracted *from Jesus*, and from the apostles, who were in her house at the time. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus|Are Your Church's Teachings Distracting You From Jesus]]) 5. **The busyness is itemized.** Pivec lists the labor NAR assigns: rebuking the right spirit, saying prayer declarations with the words "just right," pouring anointing oil into the ground, burying communion elements, waging warfare on high-ranking territorial demons. "It just keeps people so busy and so distracted." (See [[Spiritual Warfare Theology]].) 6. **"You can be like God" — the Eden charge.** The counselor routes NAR's promise back to Genesis 3: special extra knowledge plus the power to do what God does. "You can be like God, cuz how? Well, you can do all these magical things." He couples it to an evidential claim — "I have yet to see anyone, any NAR person or anyone else do any of those things. Objectively speaking, but nevertheless, they keep doubling down." 7. **NAR's "complete gospel" is dominion.** Pivec's central contribution, and the episode's most citable claim: NAR *will* acknowledge that forgiveness of sins and reconciliation come through the cross — then treat that as an **incomplete gospel**. The complete gospel, on this account, is that the cross made it possible for believers "to take dominion, to take social political control of the earth." (See [[Dominionism]] and [[Seven Mountain Mandate]].) 8. **The deliverance-ministry anecdote.** The counselor recounts a woman in a large Southern California church who was recruited into deliverance ministry, cast out demons for a period, and then realized she had never heard the gospel there and did not consider herself a Christian. Her stated horror was twofold: her own standing, and how many people she had misled while "she had no idea what she was doing." > [!quote] > "They're distracted by all these things and they're doing all this warfare ostensibly, but they're missing the main point. It's kind of like with Martha, she was serving… she was distracted. From what? Jesus." — the counselor, on Luke 10 > [!quote] > "What they would actually say is that forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, that occurs through Christ's work on the cross — that that's really an incomplete gospel. That the complete gospel would be that Christ's work on the cross made it possible for believers to take dominion, to take social political control of the earth." — Holly Pivec --- ## Analysis for this wiki The second [[Holly Pivec]] + *Reminded* episode, and a genuine addition rather than a repeat. Where [[2026-06-28-pivec-nar-anxiety-biblical-counselor|Holly Pivec — Is NAR Theology Fueling Your Anxiety? (EP 35)]] connected NAR teaching to self-condemnation mechanisms (GECS, "take it captive"), this one names a different mechanism: **attention capture**. NAR harms, on this account, not only by what it asserts but by what it consumes — the believer's day fills with warfare tasks whose failure is never scored. **The dominion claim is the most valuable line here.** Pivec states the NAR gospel-completion move more crisply than anything else in the wiki's Pivec material: the cross is granted, then subordinated. That is a direct, quotable bridge between [[Dominionism]] / [[Seven Mountain Mandate]] and the "different gospel" charge, and it belongs in any future treatment of how NAR relates to ordinary evangelical soteriology. **A structural echo worth noting.** The Eden reading — secret knowledge plus power, "you can be like God" — lands close to the *gnostic-adjacent* charge that [[2026-07-14-remnant-radio-cracking-the-time-code|The Remnant Radio — Exposing \"Cracking the Time Code\" (Candice Smithyman)]] develops at length against word-of-faith teaching, from a very different vantage (continuationist-insider rather than cessationist-leaning critic). Two independent critics reaching for the same diagnosis is worth tracking, though neither uses the other's vocabulary. > [!note] Tradition / source-caution > Conservative evangelical NAR criticism, paired with the **biblical counseling** model — and the model carries its own contestable premise, already flagged on the EP 35 page: that anxiety and depression are usually rooted in belief or sin. Read the mental-health claims as a school of thought, not a clinical consensus. The evidential claim ("I have yet to see anyone… do any of those things") is an argument from personal experience, not a study. The deliverance anecdote is a secondhand pastoral story with no verifiable detail. The soteriological frame is firmly evangelical — the woman's fear that she would have gone to hell is presented as the correct reading of her situation, which a mainline or progressive reader would contest while still granting the spiritual-abuse observation underneath it. > > **Speaker attribution is inferred.** The transcript carries only `>>` turn markers, no names. The identification of the NAR-expert voice as Pivec and the book-author voice as the *Reminded* counselor rests on the channel, the "in your book, you say" turn, and the chapter-8/Martha reference matching the EP 35 guest. Confident, not certain. > [!question] Concept-page candidate surfaced > **Attention as a spiritual-abuse mechanism** — the "distraction" thesis is a distinct harm claim from the ones the wiki files under [[Religious Trauma]] and [[Spiritual Abuse]] (which center coercion, shame, and authority). Here the mechanism is *occupied time*: an endless, unfalsifiable task list. One source is not a page; logged toward one, and folded into [[New Apostolic Reformation]] for now.