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Charisma and Spiritual Transformation 89 present in 2001 when over forty thousand dollars was allegedly collected from the small group gathered and given to support another BnF ministry in South Africa. Based on what we later learned from members of the board of trustees, we have reason to doubt that the entire amount came from the small group who gathered that night. David probably supplemented the collection with monies given to the general operating budget. This practice of supplementing free-will offerings of “extravagant giving” with BnF general funds occurred again just before the schism, when ten thousand dollars was given to the owner of a local diner. This woman was a nonbeliever and lesbian friend of David’s biological son. She used the money not to save her livelihood but to remodel her living quarters, and the BnF construction business was paid to do the remodeling. The facts were woven into two stories, narrating a noteworthy case of selfless “extravagant giving” and God’s miraculous provision of a project to help launch the new construction company. The diner closed, and remodeling the woman’s house cost the new company far more time and money over the next year than anticipated. When BnF was caught in the crunch of its own hard financial times after the schism, a story of a Sanctuary resident generously giving a check for five thousand dollars (his total life’s savings) was widely circulated. It was said that “even homeless people have money.” The man was to be recognized as someone who “gave sacrificially to the church.” David controlled both the collecting and the spending of money at BnF. It was he who selected the recipient and who appeared as the benefactor when the money was given. David liked to model “extravagant giving .” He often picked up large restaurant tabs for visitors and the select family members who dined with him. He urged his followers to follow his example and to tip servers using the measure of BnF’s value of extravagant giving. When the schism unleashed the critical voice of dissidents, extravagant giving became a choice target. As one family member commented , “David urged us to be extravagant with the little money we had, but he never used his own money for extravagant giving. It’s easy to pick up tabs and leave big tips when you are doing it with church funds.” Many others family members made similar comments to us. Three Central Meanings of Love The church/ministry of BnF provides a laboratory for exploring the complexity and varieties of love. The term love, as used in everyday language, 90 Charisma and Spiritual Transformation includes a bewildering diversity of phenomena reflected in a wide array of literary, theological, and theoretical reflections. Classifications exist for defining love into types based on historical notions (including “courtly love” and “romantic love”); those based on theological and philosophical distinctions (“eros,” “philia,” “agape,” and “caritas”) as well as everyday common distinctions (such as “friendship,” “romantic love,” and “maternal love”). At its core, however, love can be said to be a relation between a subject and an object that positively inclines one person (the lover) toward another person or object (Johnson 2001). Scholars have worked with this core understanding to produce scores of taxonomies, classificatory schema, and theories; but, as Rolf Johnson has pointed out, they still leave a major source of disagreement. These classifications often skirt discussions about the exact nature of the relation between the lover and the beloved, namely, “How the lover is inclined toward the object, what the lover’s interest in it is, how he or she is apt to behave toward it, and the nature of the lover’s feelings regarding it” (Johnson 2001, 3). Johnson proposes a classification that aims “to create a system that embraces all that we call ‘love’—from simple attractions, to exalted passions, from self-sacrificial giving to all-consuming obsession” (5). The product is a typology that he calls “the three faces” or “three central meanings” of love—faces that he labels as care-love, appreciation-love, and union-love. These three categories of love serve a heuristic purpose in helping us work through the maze of affections reflected in the interview data presented in this chapter. Before love can be assessed for qualities like purity, duration, intensity, extensity, and adequacy, as we propose to do, it is helpful to know which face or meaning of love is being presented. Johnson asserts that his three central...

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