Why You Should Stop Being Generous and Start Having All Things Common

A Testimony about Morningside Assembly of God in Sioux City, IA

In Acts 11, a man named Agabus prophesies a famine. The church in Antioch responds by taking up an offering for the Jerusalem church. In doing so, this church in Gentile territory—newly planted and in the immediate wake of the Gentile Cornelius’ conversion—had all things common with Jerusalem. They did what the Pentecostal community had done in the Judean capital. They shared their stuff (Acts 2:44).

Something similar recently happened in Iowa.

In August of this year, my church, Resurrection Assembly of God, lost an AC unit. Our building is made of cinder block. Because the windows are single pane stained glass, someone in decades past put up plexiglass on the inside of the windows, sealing it with silicone and screws hammer-drilled into the concrete blocks. The plexiglass helps with the winter heating bill. But it also means that we can’t open the windows in the summer to enjoy the ever-reliable breeze sweeping in from the corn fields. An AC unit going out means the church building gets sauna-level warm.

We didn’t have the money to replace the unit. Remember, Resurrection Assembly is an urban church revitalization, eight years in. By the grace of God, our finances have stabilized, but whenever we have something extra, something usually happens to our building that eats it up. We’d already addressed numerous unavoidable maintenance issues earlier that summer. So we prayed.

In 2016, when I had first become the pastor of the church, our heaters were in a bad place, and Pastor Patrick Kelly (then the pastor of Hope Church in Bettendorf, IA) happened to have an HVAC guy in his church that got us a deal on a couple of units, and was generous enough to donate the labor. It was an incredible gift.

I decided it was worth putting it out to the Iowa Ministry Network of the Assemblies of God to see if God might inspire someone to do something similar. I posted on a Facebook group page dedicated to Iowa Assemblies of God pastors, but I got no likes or comments, so I figured that was the end of that. Even if someone could help us, the algorithm would surely banish the post from timelines for the lack of engagement.

But a couple of days later Pastor Johnny Helton of Morningside Assembly of God in Sioux City, IA texted me to tell me that their church just happened to have an AC unit that they weren’t using sitting in a church shed. Of course, there was no guarantee that the unit would work, or that it was the right size, model, etc.

In the meantime, Pastor Abby’s husband, Kyle, who recently became an HVAC apprentice, told us that if we could find the right unit, he would help us get it installed without cost.

By the grace of God, the AC unit Pastor Helton and Morningside had was the exact model we needed for our building (Kyle was sure to reiterate how unlikely that was). And so we give glory to God.

Morningside Assembly of God in Sioux City had all things common with Resurrection Assembly of God in Iowa City. They offered what they had to meet our need. It’s an incredible testimony, and we Pentecostals love testifying.

It may seem like an overstatement to say that Morningside had all things common. Morningside didn’t sell all of their property and donate it to Resurrection. They only shared something extra that they had. But I want to insist on using the language from Acts 2, so let me explain.

As my good friend and church planter Alex Ferren said to me earlier this week, we need to be all-of-Acts-2-Pentecostals. What Alex was referring to is the Assemblies of God’s historic emphasis on speaking in tongues as it’s recorded in Acts 2. The Assemblies has insisted that the story is no mere description of what happened. Rather it’s a prescription for what the church should always expect. If speaking in tongues is a prescription for the church, then why isn’t all of Acts, and specifically the passage at the end of Acts 2 that talks about (amongst other things) the early church having all things common?

I wrote about Acts 2 and all things common in my first book. As I researched, I was astounded to see how many commentators made the passage about communism, either to embrace or reject the economic theory on biblical grounds. Growing up, I was familiar with this quandary. My Pentecostal upbringing taught me two indisputable things:

1. Acts is meant to be re-lived because the same Spirit who fell on the 120 in the upper room continues to fall on us, and

2. Communism is evil.

These two commitments meant that there was all sorts of uncomfortable wiggling in the pulpit and in the pew about what to do with the all things common passage in Acts 2.

For the record, I don’t think “all things common” is communism. As Marx himself said, capitalism is the necessary precondition for communism, and capitalism is itself predicated on feudalism. The early church and the ancient world knew nothing of capitalism because the economic theory is a product of the Enlightenment, and it assumes the demarcation of nation-states with their incumbent highly-centralized governments. So to bring these categories to the Bible is quite simply anachronistic. The Bible has things to say about feudalism, capitalism, and communism, but is not itself an advocate of any those things if for no other reason because it can’t be historically speaking.

This is why the example of Agabus and Antioch is so important, because it shows that what we see in Jerusalem in Acts 2 is not meant to be followed legalistically. Acts 2 is prescriptive in that it shows us we can have all things common in all the various and unpredictable twists and turns of history. No one expected the Gentiles to receive the Spirit, but once they did, one of the proofs that they were cut from the same spiritual cloth as the Jews is that they shared their stuff.

The church in Antioch didn't sell everything to support the Jerusalem church. But they still said that what was theirs was others’. Antioch made Jerusalem’s problem Antioch’s problem.

Similarly, Sioux City made Iowa City’s problem Sioux City’s problem. Kyle Anderson made the church's problem his problem. And for all of it, I give glory to God.

The reason I want to be so insistent in calling what Morningside did for us “all things common” is because churches do stuff like this all the time, but neglect to explain what they’re doing in biblical terms. Benevolence funds, food pantries, disaster relief, and so on are part of the fabric of the church. But I don’t want churches or church members to explain what they’re doing as mere “generosity”—even pagans are generous! I don’t want food pantries to be thought of as the work of 501(c)3s, and the preaching of the gospel as the work of the church. Rather, I want us to say, “Jesus is risen! So let’s share our food!” There’s no reason we can’t explain all of our so-called “generosity” as the newest Spirit-led iteration of all things common.

If we start doing this, we can truly become all-of-Acts-2-Christians. All-of-Acts-2-Christians see tongues of fire, the announcement of the resurrection of Jesus, the breaking of bread in the Lord’s Supper, the reading of Scripture, and having all things common not as disjointed, unrelated elements in a good story, but as the holistic, interconnected, and necessary life of the Spirit-filled church. Saying, “the Spirit is poured out!” must necessarily entail the joy of sharing our extra AC units.

All of this is to say that the church that has all things common will always assume the prior action of God. The Spirit was poured out before they had all things common in Jerusalem. The Spirit was poured out on Gentiles before the church of Antioch hosted Agabus who spoke by the Spirit before the famine. And the Spirit put an extra AC unit in Morningside’s possession before Resurrection’s unit died.

God is always ahead of us. Our job is simply to notice what good works he has prepared for us beforehand.