The gathered Church experienced as a reality Christ entering each individual heart and becoming from within the Leader and sole authority of the whole Church community. His Spirit of love, working from within them, brought a deep understanding of what was of God in others, giving the individual heart an inner freedom from all that crushed and cramped it and freeing the soul from every burden. Working from without, this Spirit came to the early Church as a concrete expression of His unifying love, which knows no boundaries. What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount was fulfilled in the early Church, as were indeed all His words. The brotherly fellowship of being truly bound together in prayer and in the breaking of bread became genuine community, embracing the whole of life.
Community means having life and goods in common.
All who had come to this faith remained together and had everything in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. As soon as that becomes more than mere words, as soon as it is reality, all things are held in common and no one can say of his goods that they are his own. There could be no poor in the early Church because the power of the risen Jesus was at work among them. Those who had land or houses sold them and brought the money to the Church. When we think how simply yet radically the Spirit of love in community was at work, it matters little how long these works lasted, at what moment this first love was bound to wither and die, or whether it could be applied in the same or similar ways in the future.