{"id":827,"date":"2015-04-23T12:21:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T16:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=827"},"modified":"2015-04-23T12:21:40","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T16:21:40","slug":"be-true-to-your-cult-ctd-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=827","title":{"rendered":"Be true to your cult, ctd<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Wisconsin church is under fire for behaving like a — GASP!<\/a><\/i> — cult.<\/p>\n

\n

A downtown Eau Claire church is picking up the pieces after a scandal that tested the faith of the congregation and led to the resignations of the entire pastoral team amid allegations of \u201cspiritual abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four Valleybrook Church pastors left after widespread claims surfaced about them pushing members and staff to reject their families<\/span>, matching unrelated pairs of parishioners into \u201cknit-together\u201d relationships to replace biological family, sharing personal information<\/span> gained in confidence, and abusing their authority by demeaning and shaming others<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ho-hum. We are solidly into the post-Christian world, and so the pressure for pastors to bind their congregations to themselves in steadily increasing. Expect stories like this to increase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Wisconsin church is under fire for behaving like a — GASP! — cult. A downtown Eau Claire church is picking up the pieces after a scandal that tested the faith of the congregation and led to the resignations of … Continue reading →<\/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\/827"}],"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=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":828,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions\/828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}