Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds of communities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve the goals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactions between organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes are organizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.

Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one can think about the church, in part, as an intentional community with its own canons and customs. This matters greatly for interpreting early church history.

Whether discussing a 21st-century business corporation or a first-century religious society, who gets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonuses and stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual (committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neither are they capitalistic. Those terms refer to orders, not organizations.