Any big long word with a “-” in the middle risks a certain level of misunderstanding. Also it’s pretentious. Nevertheless, I’m inviting you to hear me out on this one.
I’m going to describe here a way of being together in community (and since I’m a pastor, I especially mean church community) I have begun calling anarcho-commonism.
The first part, “anarcho,” is of course from the more widely known “anarchy” or “anarchist.” And although a lot of pundits on the alt-right would like to convince the world that anarchists are a bunch of molotov throwing hooligans, the reality is more complicated.
Anarchist is really about an-arche. An-, the prefix for “without.” Arche, from the Ancient Greek “ἀρχή”—the first principle, authority, method of government.
So an-arche = without authority.
Commonism may also be unfamiliar, and easily confused with “communism” (in fact my spell-check wants to auto-correct “commonism” to “communism”). Well, there are anarcho-communists, and if you want to learn about them I recommend Wikipedia.
But “commonism” is something other than communism, slightly. It’s about sharing and social-cooperation. It arises out of a discourse attempting to challenge Neo-liberalism and it’s strangle hold on the economic systems of the world, and is kind of an aesthetic or posture toward the world, communities with a sense of a relationship with “the commons,” committed to reciprocity, mutual aid, and with an understanding that commonism creatively restructures not only living spaces and architecture but also neighborhoods and community organization.
I hope that helps establish a sense of the term anarcho-commonism. Now, let’s give some practical examples.
A Little Free Library or Little Free Pantry is anarcho-commonist. There is no “authority” over an open pantry. Anyone can place food in the pantry. Anyone can take food from the pantry. There’s no surveillance system to tell anyone when the shelves are empty. There are no guards telling anyone if they take too little or give too much. It is “an-archic.”
It is also commonism, because the pantry is established in a common area, and contributes to the “commons” because all have access to it. It is neither entirely private or entirely public. It is in the middle of things, in the commons.
Now take that same kind of structure and ask yourself how it might work in church community. For example, think about preaching. Imagine if a community practiced anarcho-commonism in its preaching life. There is not one authority who preaches, but rather there is a pulpit, a place from which preaching occurs, and anyone can contribute to that preaching space, and anyone can receive from it.
To structure such a pulpit, there would still need to be specific practices in place. The community would have to structure the commons in such a way that the preaching moment could happen among a group of people who would hear it. It’s in this sense that big naked empty pulpits in public places aren’t yet an example of anarcho-commonism, because they are structures detached from the actual commons.
But in a community like a church, the community can adopt practices that are either more or less anarcho-commonist.
Take my own tradition. I’m a Lutheran pastor. Our normal mode for preaching is for a church to formally call an ordained pastor, who is then the regular preacher in that community. They are the “authority” although admittedly that authority is established through the “authority” of the calling congregation (and of course theologically speaking the authority of what they preach is established by its proximity to the “authority” of the text on which they are preaching and God’s relationship to that text).
But all kinds of questions arise. How much training does a preacher need before they are “authorized” to preach? How much authority do the voices of others have in relationship to the authority of the preacher? If someone else preaches when the pastor is on vacation, or just because, what establishes their “authority” to preach. And so on.
This is where I joke that I am becoming a Lutheran Quaker, because I no longer believe that the authority to preach is attached to getting a special degree (like an M.Div.) or from ordination (the rite Lutherans have for making pastors). Instead, I think the “authority” for preaching is in the community itself, that all the baptized have received all the gifts of the Spirit, and that anyone can potentially preach, although in all likelihood (and this is just a practical issue) only some are called to preach and mostly only one at a time).
Or take the authority of leadership within a community itself. In some ways, a lot of authority devolves upward to the pastor of a congregation, at least in many Protestant communities. Unfortunately, this often then means only the pastor makes hospital visits to non-blood relatives, only the pastor presides at the communion table, only the pastor baptizes, only the pastor officiates at weddings or funerals.
Alternatively, in an anarcho-commonist community, many can visit, preach, preside, because the commons holds the gifts as a community as things are an-archist. There is no single or primary method of government.
Admittedly, even most an-archists aren’t pure an-archists. They recognize that humans are humans, and so to some degree or other there will be forms of organization that establish one person as a primary staff person of an organization (this happens in Quaker communities, for example, where although they tend not to have paid staff, at the denominational level or in larger communities they do pay some people to do certain tasks more helpfully done by a professional).
But professionalization of a role, paying someone or a few people to do some of the work of the church, is not the same as philosophically believing that means that’s the only person or group who can do the things.
You might have a custodian, but also trust that lots of people know how to clean. So too, you might have a paid pastor but also know that lots of people know how to make bread and serve it to others.
The great value of anarcho-commonism isn’t easily articulated in just one article, because since it is often best understood through experiencing it, to get a real sense takes participation and practice. But I will offer some examples of how encouraging an anarcho-commonist posture in church life can radically change things:
People start trusting they can just do stuff. Which means surprising ministries emerge that simply wouldn’t have show up through hierarchical visioning processes.
Anarcho-commonism shatters assumptions about age, gender, class, ability, etc. The focus becomes on the commons and mutuality rather than ontic topics like who you are (identity) or why you have authority because of something that sets you apart.
Participating in a structure like this changes how we relate to others. Rather than judging “whether” someone is qualified (to take food from the pantry, to start a specific ministry, etc.) the community is invited into forms of mutual aid (how is what I put into the pantry meeting my own need to give, why is it I worry about someone having the right status to preach).
Anarcho-commonism allows for specific structures to exist because the commons inevitably does have a certain shape (anarchy is not, in this sense, chaos).
But at the same time, anarcho-commonism holds any specific shape lightly, and thus is nimble.
Finally, anarcho-commonism is simply much closer to much of what we see exemplified in Scripture. You don’t have to read very far in the Bible to discover all kinds of passages that emphasize how God calls unlikely people, sees spiritual gifts in every person for the upbuilding of the body, and in fact anticipates the “kin-dom of God” precisely in and through structures quite the opposite of earthly realms/governments/kingdoms.
Jesus is Lord is a Christian saying because Caesar is not. Christianity is inherently anarchic. And remember the very first community of Christians recorded in Acts held everything in common. That’s a real thing (whether it happened or not is an interesting historical question, but nevertheless that it is recorded in Acts establishes it is an aspiration if not always a reality).
When I was in Arizona a couple of years ago visiting the border with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, we watched a play about the first church that provided sanctuary for undocumented folks coming across the border. Although it was a Presbyterian church that provided the building, it was a Quaker pacifist who actually drove across the border and brought migrants to the church.
This is anarcho-commonism. It looks beyond the authorities and powers and toward what is shared in common, and does so because of Jesus. It’s the model, I think, for how to be church.
You may be aware that 30 or 40 years ago, Ellul wrote an essay advocating for “Christian anarchism” in Katalegete magazine. Brilliant!