{"id":7068,"date":"2017-06-12T00:06:26","date_gmt":"2017-06-12T05:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7068"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:23:49","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T18:23:49","slug":"ancient-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7068","title":{"rendered":"FRIENDSHIPS: OLD AND NEW"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>A brief reflection of mine to a friend wondering if pastors could be friends with those in their congregation.\u00a0 My answer is &#8220;yes,&#8221; but my advice for all Christians is to choose wisely.\u00a0 Here is my brief reflection:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>You may know that Augustine wrote more about friendship than anyone else in the ancient period so his perspective adds light to our discussion.\u00a0 Cicero, whose writings Augustine loved, also wrote on friendship.\u00a0 Cicero&#8217;s work is just a little before Christ so the two give nice bookends to the ancient world&#8217;s perspective on friendship.\u00a0 Cicero said you can&#8217;t be friends with tyrants or sycophants.\u00a0 Yes, I know there are loads of those in the churches!\u00a0 And with the laxity on choosing elders there are plenty of them on elder boards.\u00a0 But the perversion of a good thing does not eliminate the need for the good thing.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A brief reflection of mine to a friend wondering if pastors could be friends with those in their congregation.\u00a0 My answer is &#8220;yes,&#8221; but my advice for all Christians is to choose wisely.\u00a0 Here is my brief reflection: You may know that Augustine wrote more about friendship than anyone else in the ancient period so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,87,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-friendship","category-pastor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7071,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7068\/revisions\/7071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}