Holding All Things In Common
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Acts 2:44-46 paints a picture of life in the early church. They pooled their resources, lived as a community, spent most of their time in prayer and worship, and distributed their money to any who had need. Though the Bible claims this as the origins of the Church, we tend to be pretty far removed from that today. If this didn’t come from the Bible, we would probably look at this imagery and either think of some fringe cult living in a compound away from the rest of society (which might actually be a reasonable portrayal of the very early church) or think that this is the road to Communism. Either way, when we see this outside the Bible, we immediately reject it, so we experience some cognitive dissonance when we read about it in church.
Our culture can be pretty isolating. Despite the global connectivity provided by the internet, there are strong cultural forces driving us toward strong individualism. Certainly, the language of individual rights is fundamental to American political history. Owning private property has been an important part of American history, with it even being a requirement for voting at one point. In the 2008 Supreme Court case “District of Columbia v. Heller,” the court decided that the second amendment protected the rights of individual gun owners, disconnecting it from service in a militia, as had been the historical view. Furthermore, rugged individualism is part of the great American cultural myth, with images of self-made millionaires and tenacious pioneers conquering the frontier as individual families. We are drawn to stories in which a hero succeeds against the odds, largely by themselves or with a little help because we want to be such a hero. Individualism has played an important role in the political, philosophical, and sociological history of our country.
Furthermore, because fear and anger gets more attention than anything else, media companies seeking to increase their profits have shined massive spotlights on stories that make us afraid of our neighbors. We hear stories of crazy drug addicts who hurt people in a desperate frenzy for drug money. We hear stories of homeless people accosting innocent couples and families, threatening them for a little bit of money. We hear stories of serial killers who keep their victims locked in their basements. Bombarded with all this imagery, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to reach out to neighbors trustingly, especially if they are very different from us. Even people who aren’t terribly racist start to get nervous when the demographics of their neighborhoods change. Unsure of how to connect with people who look and act differently, we often close ourselves off, preferring to just stay inside the safety and certainly of our own homes.
It’s hard to imagine a community of thousands of people holding everything in common and spending time with each other on a daily basis, but even if we do imagine something like that, we imagine work. Sure, at our job we can spend time with our companions for hours every day, but that wasn’t what the early church was doing. They may have worked on the side, but most of their time was spent together in worship. Today, we would probably call this laziness. Instead of spending 40, 50, 60+ hours a week working, they are spending hours every day worshiping God. They have given up on productivity. They are single-mindedly dedicated to spending time together with God.
And even the money that they do have isn’t kept for themselves, it is redistributed from the rich to the poor, benefiting not the most powerful but being entrusted to the most vulnerable among them. If we looked at this early church today, we might say that they are gullible, naive, lazy, and creating a welfare-system that helps careless and unmotivated people at the cost of the industrious people among them. Of course, I don’t think any of us would say that the early church was wrong, or that God’s Kingdom should be imagined as something fundamentally different from what these Christians were practicing in Acts. We might simply say that it doesn’t work in our society. We are too big, too diverse. Not everyone in America is a Christian. Whatever the case may be, there is certainly a difference in context. However, even if we are worlds apart, there are things that we can learn from this early church. In fact, there are some things we already have learned from them.
While we don’t hold all things in common today, there are some important things that we do hold in common. One easy example is books. Libraries paid for by a community provide free access to books, computers, and various other things for people who would otherwise be unable to afford them. We rent books from libraries. It’s an agreement to share with strangers that we don’t know and may never meet. But the result is hopefully a place where both rich and poor can meet to learn and grow as people. Even better, this learning and growing can be done as leisure. People can be purely driven by their own passions rather than required for the sake of productivity. We can gather for community meetings, learn about local events, and pursue our own interests without it being overshadowed by prohibitive costs or the endless drive of the market.
When we see these images of the early church and try to apply them to ourselves today, we may be tempted to think of an obscure cult or think this advice puts us on a direct path to becoming Soviet Communists. However, we don’t need to idolize Stalin or some cult leader to learn from the early church. We have modern examples in almost every town and city in the country. If we can pool our resources to share books, computers, and digital media with our neighbors, what could we do in the church? What could we build for the sake of our communities? The possibilities are endless: books, movies, food, money, tools, lawn care equipment, pet supplies, quilting supplies. If there is anything that a community could benefit from sharing, a church can facilitate it. To live like the early church doesn’t necessarily mean we give up everything that makes us American, but maybe we could stand to let go of some of the rugged individualism and distrust of our neighbors. Who knows what possibilities await when we think creatively about how we can minister to communities in need and embody God’s good news for the poor?
