Yesterday evening was beautiful

We were at housegroup, all sat around in Sue and Ian’s garden in the cool of the evening. Birds were squabbling in the trees, a hedgehog was briefly spotted running around and conversation - both the idle chit-chat and specific to the study – was good.

We’ve been gradually working our way through Acts and were covering the bit from 4v31 to 5v11. Many might focus on Ananias and Saphira, but there seemed to be much more of value in thinking through the preceding section about the early church having all things in common and people selling fields and possessions so that there was no-one in need.

This has been suggested by some as an early form of communism, and I’ve seen people try to use it to illustrate both how communism is wrong (there were poverty issues later) and how communism is God-ordained. At the outset we need to understand, this was NOT communism, but instead having all things in common would likely have been similar to lending your car to someone who needed it. If needs were identified then someone might sell something they owned voluntarily but would have kept ownership and control of all their possessions otherwise.

So instead, what we see is a picture of a church where love was practiced in practical ways, so that those who would have been most poor should be able to eat and clothe themselves. But why should they have been poor, you might ask? Wasn’t everyone supposed to work to support themselves?

The more I read around Acts and the way the first church was, it seems to me they were living effectively together as a community (this not unusual in those times i.e. the community at Q’umran). There are references to deacons being appointed *to wait on tables* (they must have therefore all eaten together) so that the apostles didn’t have to be distracted from prayer and bible study by handling practical needs. But why did they do that, and why such a strong emphasis on the need to study instead of being out ‘pastoring’ and preaching as you might find in many current church models?

It seems most likely to me that they were working through the implications and theology of what Jesus death and resurrection meant for them in the light of their Jewish traditions and practices. It is telling that many years later, when the apostles wrote a letter to gentile Christians about what they should practice, instead of instructing them to adopt detailed traditions they simply told them to keep sex within marriage, not to get involved in idolatry and to stay away from blood and improperly slaughtered animals (Acts 15v29). While there were clearly a great deal more to their beliefs than this (the Pharisees that were part of the church tried to force their traditions on those Gentile believers) it must have required a great change of thought patterns and revelation to understand what it meant to be the ‘body of Jesus’ as the church is, and to un-pick Jewish tradition and restrictions from the new found freedom they had received through Jesus. In fact there was a constant battle as the superceded tried to dominate the new life.

I’ve often tried to put myself in their place, but frequently found it impossible. Now it seems that things are making more sense. Of course they were meeting in the temple – it was the largest open public structure, and was designed for religious practice, although obviously not a practice that involved a personal intimacy with God. But it must have been an amazing time, seeing how the fresh revelations fitted in with existing scripture, how understandings that had been held for centuries were thrown into sharp relief by the light of the Holy Spirit. How the role of relationship was discovered through the community life and how people were built together.

Unfortunately it DID go pear shaped later on. They became too inward focussed, and required persecution by the religious leadership before they would actually start fulfilling their commission ‘to take the gospel to the ends of the earth’ and leave Jerusalem. But for me, this scripture gives a fascinating glimpse into the newly-born church, and how it might have operated.