Christian Communism? Part 1

Check out Acts 2:43-47 and 4:32-37. I would suggest http://www.biblegateway.com/. Any translation! Yeah baby! (Sorry.) These are some of my all time and absolute favorite scriptures regarding the early church and how I feel today’s church truly should be! Call me radical, call me un-American, or anything in between, but this is GOOD SCRIPTURE STUFF MAN, so don’t nail Him down, a'ight?

Here we have Christians coming together every day for prayer, sharing everything they have on a small, local bases, and being so close and full of the Holy Spirit that in 5:13 we’re told “No one else dared to join them, though everyone had high regard for them.”

Guys and gals, I want this. We have sharing on a distant scope as we donate to other countries, but this is highly impersonal and I think we are missing something huge.

Let me give you a picture of our American lives today. Generally, we work for ourselves or our immediate family. Millions of men and women leave their cloistered little worlds each morning to rush out into a feverish and self-centered world in order to make possible the cloistered little world they return to each night. Coming together with Christians for prayer, study, fellowship, and worship is the exception, not the rule as are having the time to bless and build into the lives of both Christian brethren and the lost of the world. Really, we pretty much look just like the world most of the time, only we have a religious reason for being nice, not just a common courtesy. The idea of more than one family living together and sharing the worldy burdens of house work, income, bills, and childcare so that we might have more time to invest in eternal issues is far from our minds. Not so the early church.

Long before the industrial revolution and the American Dream, their was a land hard to live in and with few physical rewards. Yet the people of this land fully embraced the creed of Jesus and made it their mission in life to bless each other and their God to such an extent that personal gain and property meant nothing. What mattered was making enough money to keep the whole going while still keeping enough time open to do the many other things which are important.

Perhaps I am over simplifying this a little. I’m sure that some in those days, who had been given more ability to work and make money than others, spent a lot of time making money, while those who were needed in other ways, spent less time earning an income. I’m sure things got very specialized. Also, I’m not saying we should abandon the notion of personal property. I thing personal property is a good thing and that those who earn more, should be entitled to the fruits of their labor. However, I’ve just got this dream…

I often find life an overwhelmingly large pain in the butt. It’s not enough that I need to spend most of my days earning income, I’ve then got to cook, clean, figure out bills, taxes, savings, and still find time to invest in my relationships with God and others. Then throw in car troubles, accidents, illness, theft, expensive maintenance… the list goes on… It’s overwhelming!!! And here I am, trying to become an Artist, a profession which one must work one’s hiney off in order to get anywhere and in which all too often success is measured by survival, not prosperity.

So… the dream… What if Christians truly made communities like they did 2000 years ago? What if I could just work my butt off making decorative or functional art work, and the specialized jobs of marketing, banking, housing, etc were just automatically taken care of my church family? Hmm… well, in actuality, I would probably become a very childish, underdeveloped person dependent on others. Ok, so only some of my responsibilities are aided by others, for instance the marketing, something I’m practically incapable of … and therefore the principle is perhaps a community of people who are developing the time and resources to pick up each others weaknesses at least until they are no longer weaknesses.

Ok… I gotta get some of that aforementioned work done, so I’ll continue this thought in another post.