The Twelve Tribes: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

The church in Acts, restarted — and everything in one purse.

A communal Christian movement begun by Elbert Eugene Spriggs in Chattanooga in 1972 and now in a dozen countries. Members hand over private property, take Hebrew names, keep a Friday-evening Sabbath that opens with a circle dance, and work in the community's businesses — the Yellow Deli cafes, farms, workshops. It holds that the church fell away in the first centuries and is being restored now, tribe by tribe, to raise a people ready for the return of Yahshua.

On the record

On 22 June 1984 Vermont state police removed 112 children from the community at Island Pond. District Judge Frank Mahady ordered them released the same day and, a week later, called the operation a grossly unlawful scheme; no charges followed. In Germany on 5 September 2013, youth authorities took about forty children into care from two Bavarian communities and seized wooden rods. The European Court of Human Rights held on 22 March 2018, in Wetjen and Others v. Germany and Tlapak and Others v. Germany, that systematic caning justified the partial withdrawal of parental authority and that Germany had not breached Article 8. The community teaches corporal punishment as a duty and says so in its own literature.

Why it is filed this way

The movement calls itself the restoration of the first-century church rather than a new thing, and refuses the name of every denomination. It hangs from Christianity on that self-description.

DeitiesThe God of Israel, named as Yahweh, with Yahshua as his son. The movement refuses the name Jesus and the fourth-century creeds together, as products of the same falling-away it exists to reverse.

Founded1972 CE · Chattanooga, Tennessee

FounderElbert Eugene Spriggs (Yoneq)

AfterlifeThree eternal destinies — the holy, the righteous of the nations, and the unjust

TextsThe Bible, read as one continuous account with no break at Malachi

The map

The Twelve Tribes’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1972 CE The Twelve Tribes

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

The church fell away, and is being restored now. The community holds that the body described in Acts ended within a few centuries and that what followed was not it. Its own existence is the restoration, in progress and unfinished. Go deeper — context →

Everything in one purse. No member owns anything. Wages from the community businesses go into a common fund and everything comes back out of it, which the community reads as the plain sense of Acts 2 rather than as an ideal. Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

Y Yahshua, not Jesus. The community uses the Hebrew name and refuses the Greek one, along with the creeds, the cross as an image, and the word Christian — all of them treated as marks of the falling-away. Domain The restoration of a people, and the returnStanding Son of Yahweh, worshipped; the refusal of the name Jesus is doctrinal, not stylistic Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

Minchah, and the circle dance. Twice a day the community stops and gathers. It opens with a dance in a circle, anyone may speak, and the Friday sunset gathering adds bread and wine. When Twice daily, and at the Friday sunset SabbathWho The whole community, standing in a circle Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Hinduism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Judaism — 7 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Twelve Tribes — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Twelve Tribes shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

1 cited texts

Judge Frank Mahady, Vermont District Court, opinion of June 1984, on the Island Pond warrant
22 June 1984 — Island Pond. →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.