{"id":2429,"date":"2015-10-15T09:39:54","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T13:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2429"},"modified":"2015-10-15T09:40:40","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T13:40:40","slug":"another-shunning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2429","title":{"rendered":"Another shunning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>The Wartburg Watch<\/i> has <a href=\"http:\/\/thewartburgwatch.com\/2015\/10\/14\/woman-excommunicated-from-lutheran-church-takes-legal-action\/\" target=\"_blank\">yet another sad story<\/a> of an elderly woman shunned by her congregation for, possibly, asking some financial questions &#8212; though, thanks to confidentiality requirements, she can&#8217;t even learn what she is supposed to have said.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Since she was excommunicated from her Lutheran church four years ago, LaVonne Pfeil says that her life has been ruined.<\/p>\n<p>    \u201cI lost my church, I lost my husband, lost my reputation, lost a lot of money,\u201d said Pfeil, who\u2019s 79 years old. \u201cI can go to a grocery store. If people see me, they turn around with their cart. I used to know everybody. Now I have no friends.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As Christianity declines, churches are returning to their authoritarian, cult-like roots, and they are finding justification for it in the Gospels because those are the texts of a first-century cult fighting for its life.<\/p>\n<p>And, of course, it says something about who is sitting in church when they abandon decades-long friendships because the pastor tells them to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wartburg Watch has yet another sad story of an elderly woman shunned by her congregation for, possibly, asking some financial questions &#8212; though, thanks to confidentiality requirements, she can&#8217;t even learn what she is supposed to have said. Since &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2429\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2431,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions\/2431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}