I was asked this question recently: Some have said if you follow Christ then you are a communist. Why would they say this?

People say all kinds of things about those who follow Christ. To put this in perspective, back in the early days of the church, Christians were accused of being atheists, having orgies at their gatherings and being cannibals.

• The first accusation was made because they did not worship the emperor, so thus they did not believe in the god of the Romans.
• The second was made because the Lord’s Supper was normally preceded by what we would call a pot-luck supper. The early Christians called it a love feast (see 1 Corinthians 11:17-34), and from there, the gossip traveled fast.
• The third accusation came because people heard that at the Lord’s Supper, people were eating Jesus.

Without knowing the motivation of this person, they may have been repeating what someone else said. Or, they may be mis-applying Acts 2:44-45 “Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need.”

Either way, most Christians are not communists. Communism is a political and economic system and there are communists who are Christians. Wikipedia has a very interesting article on this topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism