History & overview · every faith gets one
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 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.
The founding
Spriggs and his wife Marsha began a youth ministry called the Light Brigade in Chattanooga in 1972 and opened the first Yellow Deli to pay for it. When members started pooling everything they owned it became the Vine Community Church, and in 1978 the whole community moved to Island Pond, Vermont.
Its founding is bound to Elbert Eugene Spriggs (Yoneq) — 1972 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world in its last age, waiting on a restored people rather than on a date.
The divine. The 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..
Death and after. Three eternal destinies — the holy, the righteous of the nations, and the unjust.