Intentional Community
We’ve just returned from visiting friends at the Twelve Tribes Messianic Community at Stentwood farm in Devon.
The Twelve Tribes are an interesting organisation, with beliefs along similar lines to the Messianic faith, and having an emphasis on giving everything up to live together with a common purse along the lines of Acts 2:44, and they celebrate the Feasts and refer to ‘Yahshua’ rather than the ‘J’ word, and Yahweh rather than ‘G-d’. For these two reasons they are often accused by mainstream Christianity of being a ‘cult’.
Our experience with the Twelve Tribes has been wonderful - they are the most friendly, loving and serving people you are ever likely to meet. Their lifestyle, living together on farms and having a life of prayer and praise together (they have 2 daily services to represent the Ner Tamid), is very appealling.
One thing which struck me on this visit, though, is that they have not as anorganisation fully embraced Torah: they lit candles during daylight on shabbat, and used gas fire to cook during daylight on shabbat. I have also heard that, during Pesach, they continue baking sourdough bread.
I think that this is a consequence largely of separating themselves from the rest of the believing Messianic community (like so many groups before them, they believe themselves to be “the only ones”). A look at their literature (especially the leaflet entitled “black box” detailling the history of Christianity / The Church, makes it easy to understand their view that all other groups are totally corrupt.
We remain good friends with the folks at Stentwood Farm (and I would be interested to visit their other communities), and continue to pray for them. As a model for living out the faith, I think theirs is unparallelled, and highly recommend people to consider the idea of community living.
I include here a comprehensive list of links, good and bad, relating to the Twelve Tribes Messianic Communities to give a balanced overview ( I think we can safely discount the articles which suggest they are cult because they are legalistic and observe Old Testament practices though.):
Apologetics Index
“cult expert” research on TT
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/t29.html
Common Loaf
TT Bakery in the UK
http://www.commonloaf.co.uk/
FACT Net (anti-cult group)
Twelve Tribes Forum
http://factnet.org/vbforum/login.php?do=lostpw
Hippie-crit
another TT official website
http://www.hippiecrit.org/
Intentional Communities directory
listing for Twelve Tribes in the USA
http://directory.ic.org/records/?action=view&page=view&record_id=5932
Ithacans opposed to the Twelve Tribes Cult
anti-TT blog
http://iottc.blogspot.com/
NEIRR pages on Twelve Tribes
New England Institute for Religious Research
http://neirr.org/mcconclu.html
Outway House
A kind of ‘half-way house’ organisation to support people who have left TT
http://www.outwayhouse.org/
Rick Ross’ pages on Twelve Tribes
Institute for the study of destructive cults
http://www.rickross.com/groups/tribes.html
Steven Alan Hassan’s Freedom of Mind Center
overview of the TT by a “cult expert”
http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/groups/t/tribes/
The black box - TT view on church history
another official TT website
http://www.theblackboxspeaks.org/
Twelve Tribes
official website
http://www.twelvetribes.com/
Twelve Tribes Ex Website
Research by a former member
http://www.twelvetribes-ex.org/
University of Virginia Religious Movements Project
Archived Profile on the Twelve Tribes
http://web.archive.org/web/20060829151659/religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/tribes.html
Wikipedia article
online encyclopedia (purportedly neutral)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tribes_(New_religious_movement)
Yoneq and the Twelve Tribes
anti-TT blog
http://yattt.blogspot.com/
My prayer for the Twelve Tribes is that they will come to the light of truth in Torah and become more and more integrated with the rest of the believing Messianic community, and that they would make teshuvah with regard to their somewhat arrogant claim of being the only exclusive true Israel (and / or church), the only ones who possess the Ruach. I think that the danger for them, if they do not do this, is that their Menorah (respresenting the Ruach ha Kodesh) will be removed from them, leaving behind only an empty and lifeless legalism.