Summit Ministries

By Jason Graham

Open 24/6

Every so often (usually during finals week), I visit a quaint café just down the main street from my cabin—The Maté Factor a Common Ground Café. They opened about five years ago (right around the time I first became a Christian and moved here to Manitou Springs). The employees all dress in long loose fitting clothing—the men with long hair and full beards and the women shy and well covered. But, despite the hippie attire and a-pig eats (pig = not kosher), the café is always brimming; most of the patrons, me included, are here to enjoy the atmosphere and the unique Brazilian tea—matte.

The entire interior of this coffee shop has been beautifully and meticulously constructed out of wood. Instead of individual chairs, a number of secluded booths are positioned around tables. Throughout the café one will find thought provoking sayings painted on the walls (such as "eternity is a long, long time") and conversation-provoking publications with titles like The Three Eternal Destinations and For Christians Only. It escapes no one's attention that this place is unique and nearly every new customer who enters is compelled to ask, "What is the story with this place?"

This is the question I first asked several years ago to a man behind the counter named Levi. He informed me that the coffee shop is run by members of an international religious community. Their story is that, contrary to what is taught in Christianity, God's one true church actually died out before the end of first century and has only recently been reborn. The Twelve Tribes, they claim, is God's replacement for the failed church of the late New Testament. The true church is recognizable by its communal way of life (i.e. owning nothing but possessing everything in common) and strict adherence to the Mosaic Law. They claim that those who call themselves "Christians" are merely apostates or false teachers or the whore of John's Revelation. We lack both the necessary "fruit" to be called holy and the indwelt Holy Spirit to be considered followers. [1] The true church is the Twelve Tribes. [2]

Who?

Around 3,500–5,000 members strong, [3] the Twelve Tribes is a conglomerate of homogeneous religious communities divided into twelve regions (ergo the term "tribes") throughout the world (e.g. the Yehudah tribe, located in the Northeastern U.S., has three communities in Massachusetts, one in New Hampshire, three in Vermont, and four in New York. Other tribes and communities are located in Argentina, Australia, the British Isles, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain). [4]

The founder of this group, Elbert Eugene "Gene" Spriggs (a.k.a. Yoneq, a.k.a the Great Apostle, and a.k.a Elijah…as in the prophet Elijah!), was raised in a Christian family but a moral product of the 60s—a reality that weighed heavily on his conscience. His early adult life would be considered "full" by most—college, a tour in the army, work as a high school teacher, guidance counselor, family businessman, and business executive—but spiritually, he reports, he was plagued. Spriggs tried and failed at marriage three times, his success in the business world was spotted by shady practices, and he was continually haunted by his father's dying exhortation, "give your life to God." While searching for spiritual meaning and briefly working at a carnival, Spriggs saw the true depravity of humanity—the freaks, cheating, mocking, and blatant immorality. Toward the end of his third marriage he began a search for God. [5]

Gene moved to California in the 70s to ride the zeal of the Jesus Movement, but within a short time became disillusioned with its fading hype and the worldly life of his fellow Christians. He eventually met Marsha—a philosophy grad, outspoken atheist, and ex-commune resident—who shared his disappointment with Christianity. Eventually she converted to the Christianity she despised and the two were married. [6]

Gene and his new wife eventually moved back to Tennessee. There they frequented numerous churches and began building strong relationships with zealous youth. They opened up their home and soon had visitors at all hours. Eventually they opened up a sandwich shop (the Yellow Deli) [7], renovated a much larger home, and began living communally with anyone interested. But the seemingly hypocritical behavior of the Church—doctrinal differences, the fruitless lives of self-proclaimed Christians, and rich parsimonious parishioners—continued to grieve the Spriggs. Likewise the churches they frequented began questioning Spriggs' friends and lifestyle. Eventually everything came to a head when Gene and his comrades showed up for church one evening only to find the service cancelled for the Super Bowl. Indignant with the church's misplaced priorities, Spriggs left Christiandom.

They never returned to formal church and began holding their own services in a nearby park. Their numbers grew and within a few years they had a half dozen delis and twice as many homes. They all worked together in delis and lived together in the homes and no one owned anything of their own. [8]

By the mid 1970s Gene had begun another community in Vermont. And by the mid 1980s, after charges of child abuse and brainwashing, the whole southern community was uprooted to the above mentioned sister location in Island Pond, Vermont. [9] From Island Pond, the movement grew exponentially. A number of new industries were started including a candle shop, futon manufacturing, and health foods stores. In 1990 the group expanded beyond Island Pond and formed a number of new communities. Today there are 37 communities, in nine countries on four continents. [10]
Which brings us back to Manitou Springs and my most recent encounter with the Twelve Tribes—a man named Dei Ag.

Meet Dei-Ag

Dei Ag [11] became a Christian in 1995 at the age of 19 after reading the Bible for the first time. Shortly there after, he began attending a Bible study, learning from other Christians, and meeting with InterVarsity on campus. But, as he grew closer to God, he struggled with the "institution" of Christianity—the legalism of his church (he was a Church of Christ patron), the shallowness of many of its believers, and some of its established doctrines (eternal destinies most notably).

However, all the while, he grew more zealous for God and began frequenting more Bible studies. He enjoyed the ones that didn't have a single designated leader. He was distressed with the commitment of its members—always the same prayer requests, very little growth, and the on again-off again faith that swung with the hinges of the church doors.

Searching for a change he joined the army where he found a new set of Christian friends and a renewed hope for Christianity. Dei Ag spent the winter months in California. All of his free time was spent at the Calvary Chapel. During the summers he worked in Colorado with the Navigators. And it was here in Manitou at this café that he first came into contact with the Twelve Tribes. While struggling with the problem of eternal destination particularly and Christian doctrinal divisions in general, he began reading the Freepaper (the literature of the Twelve Tribes mentioned above).

When Dei Ag got back to California he began raising questions about these new teachings (communal living, salvation, etc). He considered most of the responses he received to be mere pat answers or contradictory claims. The next time he came back to Colorado he joined the Twelve Tribes, turned in his possessions, and began working at their café.

Dei Ag's Beliefs

When it comes to truth, metaphysics, anthropology, [12] and morality, [13] few Christians would take issue with Dei Ag's or, more generally, the Twelve Tribes' beliefs. Truth is paramount and rigorously defended as universal and objective. Dei Ag and the Twelve Tribes believe that the world was created by God and that it is currently sustained by him and his natural and spiritual laws. Likewise, God is foundational for morality which is admittedly largely ignored by contemporary society. Main divergences with orthodox Christianity occur in the areas of epistemology and doctrine.

Epistemology

While the Bible is true, accurate, and authoritative the innumerable disagreements among Christians prove that the text by itself is simply not enough to enable followers to discern God's revelation. Rather, like the early churches in the New Testament, true disciples of Christ need the authority of Apostles. And the twelve leaders of the Twelve Tribes have taken the place of these early leaders as God's true Apostles of today. It is through their teaching that Dei Ag must form his most basic religious beliefs. It is through their leadership that he finds his daily purpose and it is to their authority that he must ultimately submit if he is to be obedient to God. Anyone who claims to follow Yashua, [14] but is not under the authority of church elders and the twelve Apostles is not actually a believer. Moreover, a believer can only be identified by his or her fruits—moral perfection, generous communal living, etc. Today only those in the Twelve Tribes possess the Spirit, which is handed down through other members.

The Church

My first question for Dei Ag was, "what happened to the early church? How did such zealous believers, possessed by the power of the Holy Spirit, fail?" His response was that no one really knows how or why they failed, but that they did and this fact is obvious. Dei Ag believes that much of the New Testament epistles are records of the early church's decline (see especially the letters to the seven churches in Revelation). Moreover, Dei Ag insists that, since every believer possesses free will, he or she can always choose whether or not they will obey or disobey God. Thus, somehow, all of those in the late early church chose, over time, to disobey the commands of God and eventually abandoned the moral life and communal living. [15]

When it came to the issue of morality and communal living, the two issues were actually very much one and the same for Dai Ag. On joining the Twelve Tribes community, a believer will quit his or her job, work for the Tribes, and give up his or her possessions for the good of the community. I could easily agree with the precept (i.e. Christians are called to be selfless and love their brothers, sisters, and neighbors more than money), but not the method. His support for the Twelve Tribes protocol was as follows:

• Jesus commanded all of those who desired to be saved to deny themselves and follow him (Luke 9:23)
• Jesus commanded his followers to go and make disciples and part of being a disciple was selling everything (Matthew 28:18ff)
• The church Christ predicted, born on Pentecost, sold everything and shared all proceeds in common (Acts 2:43–47 and 4:32–35)
• Those who do not obey Jesus and follow the pattern of first church cannot be his disciples

It is here that I tried to make a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive passages and a case for placing events within their context. According to my best understanding, Christ did command the rich young ruler to sell everything (Mark 10:21), but he also commended Zachaeus for giving half (not all) his possessions to the poor (and not the church, [16] Luke 19:1–9). Moreover, although the early church in Acts did share everything in common, there was no command that others follow suit. As conventionally understood, what we have in Acts is a description of what happened, not a universal mandate. This position did little to persuade him.

Later I found a number of other examples of Christians possessing private property without being branded apostates:

• Mark 15:43—After Jesus' death we read that Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man and secret disciple of Jesus (the later term italicized only because I find the concept "secret disciple" interesting), came to claim the body of Jesus
• John 12:1–11—Mary spent around a year's income on perfume to clean Jesus' feet
• Acts 8:3—We are told that Saul went from house to house dragging Christians out of their homes and throwing them in prison
• Acts 9:11; Acts 10:6; Acts 11:3; Acts 12:12; Acts 16:40; Acts 17:5; Acts 18:7; Acts 21:8—All mention homes that belong to Christian disciples
• 1 Corinthians 4:11—In comparing himself to those in the church at Corinth, Paul notes that the Apostles, unlike the Corinthian Christians, are homeless
• 1 Corinthians 16:2—Paul informs the Corinthians that for the collection, each one should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his or her income
• 2 Corinthians 9:7—While Paul is taking up a collection from those in Corinth, he mentions each individual should give according the compulsion of his or her heart (thus individually they had capital)
• We also see a number of house churches throughout the epistles, i.e. houses belonging to individual Christians where followers met as a community, but didn't necessarily live as a community (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15). [17]

God

Although Dei Ag ducked my questions regarding the Trinity, other Twelve Tribesmen have told me that the doctrine was a mistake. In my conversations, little elaboration of this claim has ever occurred. One member did tell me that the doctrine was most likely the result of Egyptian theological influence, i.e. just as the Egyptians had triadic sets of gods, some Christians in the second and third centuries borrowed the concept. [18] Although this wasn't Dei Ag assertion, he did assert that the creeds were specious and that perhaps the mainline Christian understanding of the incarnation was misguided.

The Creeds. On the one hand, the Twelve Tribes' has major difficulties with the Christian church's lack of unity (by which they actually mean uniformity) [19] and on the other hand they deny all authority of the Creeds.

The Creeds—Apostolic, Nicene, Athansian, and Calcedonian—I argued, arose through much work in order to clarify complex ideas, make sense out of disagreement, and to make essential church doctrine more uniform. [20] Moreover, "since the creeds faithfully summarize biblical truth, they are considered authoritative" by Christians. [21] Adherence to the Creeds is logical and a major point of unity. [22]

The Trinity. Though Dei Ag did not compare the Trinity to an Egyptian formulation, one of his brothers previously had. And since the members are taught similar things and required to believe similarly, I suggested that this was an inaccurate way of thinking about the Christian doctrine since, although Egyptians had triadic collections of gods, they were not Trinitarian. The orthodox Christian position is that there is one God in three persons, i.e. one what and three whos. [23] Since I was not exactly sure why Dei Ag and the Twelve Tribes take issue with the Trinity, I was not able to offer any systematic defense. I did however suggest that logically, since there is only one God and the Bible presents three distinct persons as God, then to avoid denying the authority of Scripture, we must think of the one God as existing in three persons. [24]

The Incarnation. Since I had never heard the Twelve Tribes' position on the incarnation before, I spent much more time probing this issue with Dei Ag. Although he did not deny that Jesus Christ (who they call Yashua) was God, they play this aspect down and always refer to Yashua as a man. A big aspect of their theology is that Jesus Christ, as a man, could have sinned but was able to overcome all temptation without any divine power.

What was peculiar, however, was that Dei Ag asserted that at the cross the divine Word somehow left the man Jesus. In fact, I was told, Jesus did not die from being beaten and hung on a cross; rather he died from a broken heart caused by being forsaken by everything divine (the Word included). When I asked why he believed this, I was only told that this was what they were taught and that they believed that a human being, not God, had to pay for humanity's sins in Hades.

The first thing I mentioned was that Hades is merely the place of the dead and not equivalent with the torment of Hell (Revelation 20:13–15), three days in Hades, therefore, did not seem like an adequate payment for all of humanity's sins. [25] Secondly, I suggested that perhaps a better way to view the event was that God did, in some way, leave the person Jesus Christ but that the divine Word did not, in fact could not, separate from the person Jesus Christ. [26]

Notes

1. In all actuality I have never had anyone at the café tell me this directly, though it is the clear message of their literature. Instead, a newcomer is usually told that this is a community of believers living like the biblical church of Acts.
2. You can visit their website at http://twelvetribes.com. It is interesting to note that other Christians who live in communities are also not considered "true believers." Only those in this particular group are authentic!
3. Yohanan of Manasseh, personal email correspondence, July 28, 2006.
4. http://twelvetribes.com/whereweare/globallist.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
5. http://twelvetribes.com/whoweare/ourbeginnings1.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
6. http://twelvetribes.com/whoweare/ourbeginnings2.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
7. You can visit their website at http://www.yellowdeli.com/
8. http://twelvetribes.com/whoweare/ourbeginnings3.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
9. http://twelvetribes.com/whoweare/ourbeginnings4.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
10. http://twelvetribes.com/whereweare/globallist.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
11. Every Twelve Tribe disciple is given a new Hebrew name when he or she joins.
12. In this area they are somewhat Pelagian, affirming that Adam and Eve's sin did result in a fallen state of humanity, but that everyone has the ability to obey their conscience and choose good over evil. This relates to their view of three eternal destiny—the Holy (i.e. the Twelve Tribes) will rule in the future kingdom, the Wicked (people like Hitler) are destined for hell, and the Righteous (i.e. those who lived relatively good lives according their conscience) will be ruled by the Holy. See http://twelvetribes.com/publications/-3ed.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
13. I had a very hard time understanding his view on salvation and after reading that section on their website I am only more confused, http://twelvetribes.com/publications/unmasking-othergospel.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
14. Dei-Ag and those in the Twelve Tribes believe that Hebrew is the pure language of God—the original tongue before the incident at Babel. Moreover, they believe that the early Apostles spoke Hebrew and that when God communicated he continued to speak Hebrew. Therefore, they do not call the Messiah Jesus, rather Yashua. It is however worth noting that God spoke to Paul in Aramaic (Acts 26:14).
15. My response was that the epistles did seem to contain a fair amount of correction, but not necessarily a prophecy for or record of extinction. In the end his group's presupposition led him to read the Scriptures from this angle and there was little convincing him otherwise.
16. Though it should be noted that those in Twelve Tribes believe they are "the poor," which of course makes commandments such as "give to the poor" and "taking care of the poor" much easier to obey!
17. Also see Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999).
18. To this individual I pointed out that a distinction needs to be made between triadic gods and the doctrine of the Trinity. Moreover, the doctrine of the Trinity is the best explanation for what we see in the Bible, three persons each addressed as God and strict adherence to monotheism.
19. See http://twelvetribes.com/publications/liftingup-holyhands.html, accessed July 21, 2006.
20. Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, 2nd ed. (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1995), 99–115.
21. Kenneth R. Samples, Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 54.
22. It is one thing to simply shrug off the creeds, but it something else entirely to 1) give reasons for do so and 2) to supply something in its stead and 3) be able to defend it. Since Dei Ag was not specifically able to tell what problems he had with the creeds, I will have to look into the issue at a later time. There are literally hundreds of pages of information on their website regarding this and similar issues.
23. Samples, Without a Doubt, 65.
24. Ibid, 67.
25. I later realized that this very point counts against my own position, i.e. whether merely a man or the God-Man, three days in Hades is not equivalent to the everlasting torment of Hell that all sinners deserve.
26. After reading the section of their website noted above, I am not sure that this is the traditional Twelve Tribe understanding. Which is of course puzzling because members are suppose to believe alike.

Copyright © 2006 Jason Graham