"Are Christians Supposed to be Communists?"

I am not sure about communist. I think Biblical belief especially new testament teaching has a very strong component of altruism based on Jesus teaching and modeling. Thus, I think Christians should be altruists. If the great commission is about teaching other to observe what Jesus taught the disciples of the early church, my question is what happened about the continuity of the practice in New Testament church. How close are the Christians today following the instruction of Christ? Are the churches today The Church of Christ? God is God whether we let Him be or not. What I or we can do is ask for mercy that we can be His followers embraced selflessness for others.

At the risk of stating the obvious, no, we are not called to be Marxists but true Christian faith will result in communist (in the wider sense) behaviour. Still leaves questions about how or whether the community enforces such behaviour - protestant thinking can be hazy about communal, as opposed to individual, response to the gospel.

I've been reflecting on something similar recently. There was frequently the observation in communist (Marxist) systems that when things belonged to everyone they belonged to no-one so no-one took care of anything. Alternatively in some cases actually the community custodians actually behaved as if they personally owned everything. These seem to me less like inevitable deficiencies of communism, but deficiencies of attitude to the communism. In the first case we see radical depersonalisation where impersonal systems displace any notion of personal responsibility and rights. That is clearly not what happened in the early church as is clear from the very intensely personal accounts of Barnabas, then Ananias & Sapphira and their approaches to personally voluntarily sharing things to support those who had need. We sometimes in the post-industrial-revolution world have idolised consistency to the extent that we think it's good to provide for people uniformly and impersonally. (At the same time individualisation takes over many areas so we have the worst of an individualistic concern for ourselves alone and then depersonalised, institutionalised care for others.) So sometimes we expect 'the church' (or 'the state') to do something for needy people, forgetting that we are the church (and we are society). Obviously the 2nd morbid case of megalomaniacs treating all 'communal' property as their personal possession is a danger I'm familiar with in African contexts and from Personality Cults. But what I find notable is that in the Acts account of the community of disciples following the Way of Jesus there is no sign of either depersonalisation of contributions nor the apostles acting as Big Men and grabbing everyone's possessions to be their own. Yet, in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, and later the warnings to the Thessalonians, there are warning signs about dysfunction that too easily could destroy the sense of everyone really caring for everyone, bearing each others' burdens. So perhaps it is gospel-hearted personal generosity that is important rather than 'communism'. What do you think? Neither communism nor capitalism are the answer. Not a new suggestion, is it?! Maybe it's healthy for capitalists to be shaken up by communism and vice versa. But flipping between one -ism and the other won't really help anyone.