There is a passage of scripture which helps us reflect on an important subject: economics. The passage, Acts 2, concerns the economy of Christian fellowship.
The passage begins by saying that the early Christians devoted themselves to teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Many signs and wonders were done, it says, and all who believed were together and had all things in common. They were drawn together by the force of their fellowship.
I think the message of the passage, or at least the one that I want to emphasize, is that the coming of the Spirit had created among them a common life. The fruit of that common life was this: they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to any and all as they had need.
Some day somebody should write a book about all the parts of scripture which we have spent so much energy in avoiding. This passage would be high on the list.
We've all heard the standard rebuttal to this scripture: that this was merely an early model for the church and that it failed. Being people who don't like failure, we can disregard it and thereby keep our economic lives private.
This common life didn't simply fail, however. There's much evidence that it found expression again and again in the life of the early church, and that it continues to find expression today.
Some others have sought a new rule for the church out of this passage, saying that a common purse is the road to church renewal.
The point is that this passage is neither a description of failure nor a new rule or model for the church. It is simply a description of what happened when the Holy Spirit invaded the life of the early Christians.
The coming of the Spirit among them shattered the old, normal economic assumptions and created an entirely different economic order, a new economy among them--a new way of thinking and living which affected their relationship to money and the distribution of goods. The Spirit created among the believers a common life, in which economics was no longer a private matter. Economics was a matter of fellowship; in fact, a central question of fellowship.
I don't think there's any way that the early Christians could have conceived of how to share their lives spiritually without sharing their lives economically. The one always was related to the other.
Paul, later on in his Corinthian correspondence (2 Corinthians 8) would go so far as to correlate spiritual unity with economic equality. He was not just talking about equality within a congregation, but across geographic, national, and racial boundaries.
One result of the fullness of the Spirit's presence in the early church was the creation of an economy which was and continues to be a scandal to normal economic assumptions.
On a trip I took to California some years ago, the contrasts in the church were highly visible. Moving from the Catholic Worker in East Los Angeles to a wealthy suburban church the next morning told me a lot about the impoverishment of the church: not only in relationship to the poor--that was rather obvious--but in relationship to the life of the churches themselves.
The problem is not just that the wealth possessed by the churches is oppressive of the poor. The wealth in the churches impoverishes the spiritual life and vitality of the churches. One mark of the Spirit's presence is the extent to which the believers have found the grace and freedom to share their money and their possessions with each other and with any and all who have need.
Now these early Christians shared, not out of a sense of obligation, but with glad and generous hearts, says the book of Acts. No legalism here. It was an experience of joy and spontaneous offering. And then, it says, they praised God, and the Lord added to their number daily.
As I reflect on this passage, it strikes me that many people find different things in the words. There are whole movements within the churches concerned about the Spirit and the spiritual renewal of the body of Christ; for them, this passage about the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is crucial. And there are others concerned about justice and the redistribution of wealth for whom this passage is also key.
But somehow each group usually manages to miss what the other sees, to miss the vital connection between the coming of the Spirit and the creation of a new economy.
Why does that happen? Why is it that we take the part and not the whole? Why do we continue to act out of false choices? This is a serious concern, the heart of which is the integrity of the passage itself and what it says to us.
According to Acts, the new economy--doing something different about bread--is the visible consequence of the Spirit's presence; it is a sign. It's maybe even the test of the fullness of the Spirit. That is a very hard word to hear for many people who want to stay in the upper room with the Spirit and never want to come down to the street and live out the new economy that the Spirit has created.
It is that very presence of the Spirit, however, which breaks through the old assumptions and breaks down our self-interest to create the new economy.
But to talk of the Spirit is, for many, an awkward and embarrassing subject. It sounds too much like the pious past, recalling religious backgrounds from which many have fled.
Charity and Personal Change
I think the lesson of Acts 2 is that any spiritual renewal that doesn't result in a new political economy is an incomplete, if not inauthentic, spirituality. But, on the other hand, the creation of a new economy in the churches is not going to come about merely through good intentions on our part or that of our congregations. Nor do I believe that it will simply come about through good social and economic analysis. It will come about only when we begin to experience something of what the early believers experienced in their own lives when the Spirit created among them a wholly new economy.
I am thinking too about the gospel story of the widow's mite. The example of the political economy she demonstrated in her act of giving had little to do either with her good intentions or with her social analysis. It had to do with her relationship to the God she loved, a relationship which had transformed the economics of her life.
Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are materialists with no real experience of the Spirit, or individualists with no real commitment to community. An American Indian once challenged an audience of Christians in which I was sitting. He asked us to pretend we were all Christians who didn't want to accumulate material possessions but who actually loved one another and put everything in common and treated each other as family. Then he asked what kept us from doing that. We increasingly gain better understanding of the historical and systemic reasons that have brought about our present economic situation. But the question remains: What is it that prevents Christians from living like Christians?
I am increasingly convinced that it has less to do with ill will or bad intentions; it has more to do with how small our communion with God and with one another really is. Most of us in the churches have yet to find the spiritual strength and resources that would enable us to live out our faith.
My deepest prayer is that we come to understand how the Spirit of God would free us from both spiritual lukewarmness and the economic conformity that has so utterly paralyzed the church's life.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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