{"id":47931,"date":"2014-11-11T15:48:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T22:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/11\/cults-of-personality-churchly-or-otherwise-rarely-end-well.html"},"modified":"2014-11-12T09:07:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T16:07:53","slug":"cults-of-personality-churchly-or-otherwise-rarely-end-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/11\/cults-of-personality-churchly-or-otherwise-rarely-end-well.html","title":{"rendered":"Cults of Personality, churchly or otherwise, rarely end well"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The phrase &quot;feet of clay&quot; comes from the Bible (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Feet_of_clay\">http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Feet_of_clay<\/a>), and Paul certainly emphasized over and over how all people are sinners &#8212; so you would think that Christians, at least, would have learned by now that blindly following a charismatic religious leader often results, ultimately, in disappointment, disillusionment, and dissolution of the church in question.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, we make the same mistakes in personal relationships, too. In fact, there&#39;s probably a lot of similarity there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"sm2wp\"><p>\n<a style='display:inline;' href='http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/national\/archive\/2014\/11\/houston-mark-driscoll-megachurch-meltdown\/382487\/?single_page=true'><br \/>\n<img src='https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/D_-qTeM52Hwcma9uil4KAgfPZxRAoEmGAFhcs75uqKAuimGlYZ4rhEiiqTSC8TTDFnfxVi7Ow930eZowu1k1NvsU2ofOHCqPtaqDlPdvZkXyWB8q6RFBt_cDyBuoKs24Khlr=w506-h303-p' border='0' \/><br \/>\n<\/a><br \/>\n<span style='font-size:large;'><a href='http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/national\/archive\/2014\/11\/houston-mark-driscoll-megachurch-meltdown\/382487\/?single_page=true'>How a Megachurch Melts Down<\/a><\/span><br \/>\nWhat the dissolution of one of America&#8217;s fastest-growing churches means for evangelicalism\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style='font-size:small;'><a href='https:\/\/plus.google.com\/101083456815352083930\/posts\/VkddUaL1Tk6'>View on Google+<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The phrase &quot;feet of clay&quot; comes from the Bible (http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Feet_of_clay), and Paul certainly emphasized over and over how all people are sinners &#8212; so you would think that Christians, at least, would have learned by now that blindly following a charismatic religious leader often results, ultimately, in disappointment, disillusionment, and dissolution of the church in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/11\/cults-of-personality-churchly-or-otherwise-rarely-end-well.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Cults of Personality, churchly or otherwise, rarely end well&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[106,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plusposts","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47974,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47931\/revisions\/47974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}