My documentary about community life in the Jesus Army – Everything in Common –  is almost complete. It still needs some sound mixing and small fixes, but in a month’s time I will release it on my YouTube channel. I have shown the film to some friends here in Uppsala and many have become inspired and fascinated by this kind of living by watching it. Here’s a snippet where some Jesus saints explain what community life means to them:

The people that have joined me on my trips to the Jesus Army have become dramatically inspired as well during the visits. Just seeing community of goods in practice makes so many disciples thirst for it. Asking people to “come and see” where we live, as Jesus did (Jn 1:39) is a simple but effective way to catalyst a movement.

Many communities have historically been quite isolated, which really isn’t a necessary component of community of goods but a natural consequence of many of them being rural due to their means of sustainance as well as skeptical to communication technology due to their values of simplicity.

However, this is changing. The Bruderhof are very active with showing their community life on YouTube and Facebook, the Jesus Army is doing an excellent job there as well, and recently the Jesus People USA have started to push their social media a lot, releasing this video:

My hope and prayer is of course that Everything in Common will be yet another tool in God’s hands to inspire community life. I’ve often told my friends at the Jesus Army that as soon as there are wineskins in form of models for a Biblical lifestyle, the new wine will find its way. I see so much radicality among the youth of Sweden, but since there hardly are any Christian communities here, they don’t get to live an apostolic life. It’s not that they don’t want to, they just don’t know how.

While there certainly are many people who want to live in luxury and self-indulgence, many born-again Christians participate in the consumerist monster machine not because they enjoy it but because they don’t see any alternatives. Communities with common purses are such alternatives, and that’s why we constantly need to remind the world and the church of their presence. As Shane Claiborne would put it. another world is not only possible, it’s already here.