"And all that believed were together, and had all things common." One sentence in Acts 2, and two thousand years of argument.
Socialists quote it to prove Jesus was one of them. Capitalists rush to explain it away before anyone gets ideas. I think both camps are asking the wrong question. The right question isn't whose politics the early church validates — it's what this economy was actually for, how it was actually ran, and why almost every version of it eventually came apart.
It did work, though — and it happened more than once, in more than one form.
The Question Everybody Skips: Why Have "All Things in Common" at All?
Before we get into mechanics, I want to ask the question I almost never see asked. Why would we do this in the first place? Why in the world are we working toward a society that holds all things in common?
My honest answer is straightforward: so that there are no poor among us. That's it. "All things in common" was never the goal. It's the tool. The goal sits one level higher, and scripture names it every single time this pattern shows up — "no poor among them" (Moses 7:18). The economics exist to serve that, not the other way around.
Here's why that goal matters so much to me. When there are no poor among us, there's a floor under human suffering — nobody stuck in pure survival mode, nobody begging on the street for their next meal. Walk down a street where people are suffering and unmet, then walk down a street where everyone's needs are covered. You can feel the difference in the air. Those are two different frequencies. When you lift people off the bottom of the pyramid — Maslow's hierarchy, the food-and-shelter floor — you free them to actually become who they're meant to be. A society with no poor among it is a society that can raise its whole vibration, its whole conscious awareness, and keep ascending toward God together.
There's an even deeper reason underneath that one. In Zion, we're one spirit. Individuals, yes — but one spirit. So the reason I don't want anyone poor among us is, in the end, personal: that person is me, and I am that person, in the spirit. Jeremiah described the day when no one will need to say to his neighbor, "Know the Lord," because we all will. That's the covenant Jesus came to fulfill and that Joseph Smith came to restore. "No poor among us" is what that oneness looks like when it touches money.
Hold onto that "why," because it's the thing that keeps this from being a policy debate. Now let's look at what the early church actually built.
What Acts 2 and 4 Actually Describe
Two passages give us the picture. Acts 2:44–45: "all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." Then Acts 4:32–35 sharpens it: "neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common... neither was there any among them that lacked."
Read those slowly and three mechanics fall out. Contribution — people sold possessions and brought the proceeds in. Distribution by need — resources were "parted to all men, as every man had need," not split equally, but matched to what each person actually lacked. Then administration — it was laid "at the apostles' feet," so there was a trusted center coordinating the flow. Contribution, distribution by need, trusted administration. That's an economic system, in plain language.
Notice what the text does not say. It doesn't abolish private property. It doesn't hand anything to the state. It doesn't force anyone in. Every one of those ideas gets projected onto the passage — and the very next chapter shuts them down.
The Ananias Test: Why It Wasn't Communism
Acts 5 is the smoking gun, and almost nobody reads it as economics.
Ananias and Sapphira sell property, secretly keep back part of the price, and lay the rest at the apostles' feet while pretending it's the whole amount. Peter confronts Ananias, and the line that matters is this: "Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?"
Stop there. Peter — head of the church, in the middle of the "all things common" community — tells Ananias the property was his to keep. He was under no obligation to sell it. Even after the sale, the money was his. Their sin was never keeping their property; it was lying to the Holy Ghost, faking a consecration they hadn't made.
That single verse dismantles the communism reading. Communism means the collective owns everything and you can't opt out. What Acts describes is the opposite: real individual ownership, respected, with consecration laid on top as a voluntary covenant. You gave because your heart had changed, not because a commissar counted your bushels. Voluntary stewardship versus state coercion is the whole difference between Zion and every counterfeit of it — and Peter draws that line in one sentence.
Two Kinds of Zion: Mobile vs. Stationary
Here's where it gets interesting, and where I think most treatments of this topic go flat. People talk about "all things in common" like it's one thing. It isn't. In the scriptures I've studied, there are essentially four examples of it — and they split into two completely different economic models.
The four: Enoch's city (Moses 7, where prophets have taught that "no poor among them" was built on an all-things-in-common order, even though the text doesn't spell it out); the church in the book of Acts; the Nephites in 4 Nephi; and the early Restoration church in the 1800s living the law of consecration. Some people add Melchizedek to that list. I've looked — I listened through the book of Melchizedek and scrolled the canon — and I couldn't find the economic principle of all things in common attributed to his people anywhere. His city sought after the city of Enoch, but that's a different claim. So I'll leave him as a maybe and stick with the four I can actually source. (There are surely communes practicing versions of this in the world right now, too — it's not an exclusively scriptural idea.)
Now the split. Out of those four, exactly one is mobile, and it's the book of Acts.
Mobile all things in common is a missionary economy. The early church was fulfilling the Great Commission — going town to town, place to place. As new converts joined, they'd sell their homes, their goods, their businesses — everything they held in the mainstream economy — and donate the proceeds to the group, to be distributed by need so there were no poor among them. But notice: they weren't building businesses. They weren't producing goods and services and embedding themselves in the economy. They were spreading the gospel full-time, and the whole thing was funded by the liquidation of new converts' assets. That makes it a secondary, parallel economy running alongside the mainstream one — and, functionally, an organism dependent on continual new conversion to keep the lights on. Beautiful for a traveling church. Impossible as a permanent society. You can see the math fall apart: if the plan is to convert everyone and have everyone sell their house, eventually nobody has a house, and there's nothing left to produce.
Stationary all things in common is the other model — Enoch's city, 4 Nephi, the early LDS church. A stationary Zion has to actually produce. It has real supply and demand for legitimate goods and services, a skill-and-capacity-based economy, with some portion of the proceeds redistributed so that there are no poor. In a society with equal access to education and no one left unable to participate, that would look like an economy in near-perfect equilibrium — supply and demand matched, needs met, no gap. That's the model the New Jerusalem of our day requires. Critically, it's meant to spread across the whole earth not as one tyrannical central authority, but as many self-governing nations, cities, and counties each living the order. As I laid out in the last post, Zion — one heart and one mind — has already begun to be re-established through the return and presence of the Lord. Establishing it economically, everywhere, is the stationary work in front of us now.
The Sliding Scale: From Tithing to Full Consecration
One more piece before we talk about why this is so difficult. "All things in common" isn't a single switch that's either on or off. It's a dial.
On one end sits full consecration — nearly 100% of goods and services flowing through a central redistribution so there are no poor. On the other end sits tithing — a flat 10% redistribution. Here's the thing people miss: tithing is itself a form of all things in common. A gentler setting on the same dial. When the early LDS church couldn't sustain full consecration, it didn't abandon the principle — it slid the dial down to tithing and kept going. Somewhere between those two ends is a whole spectrum of workable settings, and probably some creative arrangements nobody's tried yet. The principle is constant — redistribute enough that no one is poor. The percentage is a design choice.
The 200-Year Case Study Nobody Talks About
The mobile church in Acts can't prove the stationary model lasts — it was a different animal, and short-lived at that. For that proof you need a stationary Zion that actually stood the test of time. 4 Nephi ran two hundred years.
After the resurrected Christ visited the Nephites: "they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift." Result: "there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God."
Two hundred years — and read the wording carefully, because it does something none of the other examples do. It says there were "neither rich nor poor" among them. Not just no poor. No rich either. Hold onto that; I'll come back to it, because I think it's the tell most people miss.
First, though, don't skip the other phrase — "partakers of the heavenly gift." That's not incidental. The heavenly gift is the endowment: endowment means gift, on high / heavenly means from God — the endowment of power, the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost. Misread it as some fringe ritual and the whole verse warps. Read correctly, it's telling you the economic order was welded to something spiritual: these people were partakers of communion with God, born of the Spirit, one heart and one mind. That's the non-negotiable. An all-things-in-common economy only holds when it's coupled with souls actually brought into the kingdom — people carrying the Christ-conscious awareness, reborn of the Spirit, entered into Zion. Kingdom of God, Zion, one heart and one mind, New Jerusalem: as I covered last time, these are near-synonyms. The economics are the outward body; the heavenly gift is the life inside it.
Why It Didn't Last: Throttled Growth and Undefined Boundaries
So why did a society this happy eventually come apart? The record itself points to pride — it says the people "were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel," and from that point their goods stopped being common. I take that seriously; the spiritual condition is what carries the whole thing, and when it faded, the order faded with it. But I read something structural underneath the pride too, and it's the detail I flagged a moment ago.
4 Nephi is the only one of these examples that erased wealth at the top as well as poverty at the bottom — no rich among them, not just no poor. That's total leveling, and I don't think total leveling is the pattern Jesus actually taught. Think of the parable of the talents: the servant who took what he was given and multiplied it was the hero; the one who buried his was the one condemned. The rest of the Book of Mormon runs the same direction — it credits "free intercourse one with another, to buy and to sell, and to get gain" (Helaman 6:7–8) with prospering the people far more than any forced equality ever did. So here's where I part ways, respectfully, with a flat reading of 4 Nephi. Zion needs a floor, not a ceiling. "No poor among us" — an unbreakable base standard of living — is the goal. "No rich among us" is a throttle on the very enterprise that lifts everyone. In the model I've compiled, each of us is free to produce according to our individual talents, while still satisfying the principle of all things in common through a basic, acceptable standard of living guaranteed for everyone. Someone far wealthier than me is no threat to Zion; someone left destitute is.
That points at the real scarce resource — not the redistribution formula, but spiritual maturity, that heavenly gift again. It also points at a hard limit on scale. In my experience studying these orders, central planning of a shared economy works at about the size of a family homestead. Picture a compound where the grandfather owns the land and distributes it fairly among his kids. At that scale, one heart and one mind is achievable, and it can genuinely work. Push much past the homestead and it starts to deteriorate. That's why the stationary experiments haven't stood the test of time — with one exception: Enoch's city, which didn't collapse but was translated, taken up into God's presence whole. 4 Nephi didn't last. The early LDS consecration didn't last either; it defaulted back to tithing.
When you read the early Restoration attempts closely, some of the failure is almost comic in how human it is. Take the early church's consecration experiments — you run straight into the question: what is a "thing"? There's the account of a man who took another man's watch without asking and shrugged, "I thought we had all things in common." So where's the boundary? Say it plainly and it gets uncomfortable fast: is your spouse a "thing" held in common? I'm convinced a real chunk of the early spirit wives and polygamy tangle grew right out of that unresolved boundary — a failure to define what consecration actually covered. Which loops us back to the heavenly gift. Get that wrong — mistake communion with God for something carnal — and the whole order curdles. Get it right, and "all things in common" stays what it was meant to be: one heart, one mind, no poor among us.
A Family Endeavor: Where I Come Into This
I'll be honest about why this one isn't abstract for me.
Seven generations up, my grandfather is Heber C. Kimball — one of the original Quorum of the Twelve under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Heber lived all of this: the consecration communes that didn't hold, the polygamy, the whole hard experiment of trying to build Zion before the people were ready for it. The good and the bad of it are baked into my literal DNA. I've had many visitations over the years — Heber, Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith III, Brigham Young, the Pratt brothers, a whole bench of the early brethren — and I don't think that's a coincidence. They're in my epigenetics. My body comes from their blood. Go back further and I'm a Mayflower descendant too, and many of those passengers came talking about establishing the New Jerusalem on this land.
So for me, writing about all things in common is picking up a family endeavor that's been running for generations — trying to sanctify their sacrifices by finally getting the thing right. They gave their whole lives to restore the Zion order and bring back the city of Enoch. This work is me carrying that forward. It's in the blood, and I feel the weight of it.
What "All Things in Common" Asks of Us Today
So what do we do with this, standing where we stand?
Don't wait. It's tempting to read all of this as "someday, when the Lord sets up the system." But every version that ever worked started the same way — a small body of people whose hearts had actually changed, of one heart and one mind, building trust before they built structure. The trust comes first. It always comes first.
Which means the work in front of you and me isn't political or distant. It's the unglamorous, immediate work of becoming the kind of people the economy of Zion runs on — genuinely willing that there be no poor among us. You can start living that at the size you've been given: a family, a ward, a neighborhood that refuses to let anyone among it lack. Nobody's stopping you from practicing it at homestead scale right now. That's how it always began. A few people, of one heart, and no poor among them. Everything else scripture describes is just that, grown up — and finally, this time, meant to cover the earth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "all things in common" mean in Acts 2:44?
It means the early Christian believers pooled their resources so no one among them went without. Acts 2:44–45 describes them selling possessions and distributing the proceeds "as every man had need" — a voluntary system of contribution, need-based distribution, and trusted administration through the apostles. It was not forced collectivization and not an abolition of private property. It was also a tool toward a higher goal: that there be "no poor among them."
Why did the early church hold all things in common in the first place?
So that there would be no poor among them (the pattern named in Moses 7:18). "All things in common" was never the ultimate goal — it was the means. The end was a society with no one left in poverty, which lifts people out of pure survival, reduces suffering, and lets a whole community rise together spiritually. Underneath it is the conviction that in Zion we are one spirit — so caring for the poor is, finally, caring for ourselves.
Was the early church communist or socialist?
No, not in the modern sense. Communism and socialism involve collective or state ownership you can't opt out of. The early church kept private ownership intact — in Acts 5:4 Peter tells Ananias the property and money were his own to keep. What made it different was that people chose to consecrate what was theirs, out of a changed heart, not because any authority compelled them.
Was giving in the early church mandatory or voluntary?
Voluntary. The clearest proof is Acts 5:4, where Peter tells Ananias, "Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?" The property was his to keep and the money his to direct. Ananias's sin wasn't withholding — it was lying about how much he'd given. Consecration was a covenant of the willing, not a tax.
What is the difference between "mobile" and "stationary" all things in common?
A mobile version — the book of Acts — is a missionary economy: converts liquidate their assets in the mainstream economy and donate the proceeds to fund a traveling church spreading the gospel. It produces no goods of its own and depends on continual new conversion to survive. A stationary version — Enoch's city, 4 Nephi, the early LDS church — is a self-sufficient producing economy with real supply and demand, redistributing enough of its output that no one is poor. Building the New Jerusalem in our day requires the stationary model, spread across the earth as many self-governing communities rather than one central authority.
How does tithing relate to all things in common?
They're points on the same dial. Full consecration (nearly 100% redistribution through a central storehouse) sits at one end; tithing (a flat 10%) sits at the other. Tithing is itself a gentler form of all things in common — which is why, when the early LDS church couldn't sustain full consecration, it slid to tithing rather than abandoning the principle. The constant is redistributing enough that no one is poor; the percentage is a design choice.
What does 4 Nephi say about having all things common?
4 Nephi describes a society, after the resurrected Christ's visit, where "they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor," and the people were "partakers of the heavenly gift." It lasted about two hundred years and is called the happiest of any people God created. The "heavenly gift" is the endowment of power — communion with God, the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost — showing the economic order was inseparable from a spiritual one.
Why did "all things in common" stop working?
A few reasons, as I read it. Spiritually, the unity behind it faded — the record names pride creeping in. Structurally, central planning of a shared economy tends to break past family-homestead scale. Finally, 4 Nephi adds a third clue: it's the only example that erased wealth at the top as well as poverty at the bottom, and I suspect that total leveling — a ceiling on enterprise, not just a floor under need — is part of why it couldn't sustain itself. The rest of the Book of Mormon credits free enterprise ("free intercourse... to buy and to sell, and to get gain," Helaman 6:7–8) with prospering the people. The one community that never fell was Enoch's, and it was translated into God's presence rather than left to run indefinitely.
Can Christians practice "all things in common" today?
Yes, at the scale you've been given. Every version that worked began small — a body of people whose hearts had genuinely changed, building trust before structure. That can start in a family, a ward, or a neighborhood caring for its own so no one lacks. Scaling it to a civilization requires both a converted people and real institutions to hold them, but the willingness to ensure there are "no poor among us" is something anyone can begin practicing now.
Why this system works, why it broke, and how it gets rebuilt before the Lord returns — that's the whole project of my book, Metanomics: Reverse Engineering the Economy of Zion. The Lord gave me this framework a piece at a time, and sharing it is the whole reason this site exists.
Related: The Return of Jesus Timeline: What Scripture Actually Says — the "one heart, no poor among them" Zion this post describes is the same one that timeline is building toward. Next in this series: "What Is the Economy of Zion?" and "The United Order vs. Modern Communism," which pick up the stationary-Zion and consecration threads directly.