The death of the Founder of the Twelve Tribes leaves the future uncertain for the international Christian movement founded in Chattanooga

The founder of the Twelve Tribes died last month, raising questions about the future of the religious movement created in Chattanooga that operates businesses around the world and for decades has faced allegations of child abuse.

Elbert Eugene Spriggs Jr., known in the movement by the Hebrew names “Yoneq” and “the Anointed One,” died on the Twelve Tribes campus in Hiddenite, North Carolina, Jan. 11 at age 83, according to a death certificate from the Department of Health and North Carolina Human Services.

The international, fundamentalist Christian movement, created by Spriggs, operates the Yellow Deli on McCallie Avenue. The community of thousands of members operates similar restaurants, as well as inns and farms, in dozens of locations across the country and around the world, including Australia, France and Argentina, according to the community website.

Businesses fund their communities trying to reflect the Christian church in the first century. Members live together, sharing possessions as well. Ata describe themselves as the creation of a new society and social order, supporting each other to stay away from the world’s perceived moral failures, such as broken family relationships, environmental damage, and increased secularization.

Born in 1937 to Elbert and Mabel Spriggs, Spriggs grew up in Chattanooga. He was an outstanding footballer at Central High School and went on to graduate from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a degree in psychology. He served in the U.S. Army and later worked as a tour guide and tour director for a travel agency.

While in California, he devoted his life to setting up a ministry, according to a report at the time by Chattanooga News-Free Press. Spriggs said he wanted to reach out to young people who did not go to church, especially those who had strayed from the faith of their parents.

“You can not cheat a dog or a child,” Spriggs told News-Free Press in 1974. “Children see hypocrisy and phonetics in their parents’ lives. Their parents take alcohol, sedatives, cigarettes. Or they do not obey.” “They want their children to stay away from drugs and obey all the laws.”

Spriggs opened the Vine House with his fourth wife, Marsha, in East Ridge during the Jesus Movement in the early 1970’s. The house hosted Bible studies and other meetings. By 1974, the ministry operated three homes in the same block. The couple opened the original Yellow Deli at Chattanooga on Brainerd Street in May 1973.

“When people ask us who our interior designer is, we tell them we have the same one that Noah had,” Spriggs told the News-Free Press in 1974.

Other faith communities in Chattanooga excluded them from the group. Students at the former University of Tennessee Temple, as well as Covenant College and Bryan College, were barred from attending the restaurant.

Several hundred members of the group left for Vermont in 1979 onwards what the group described as “anti-cult hysteria” in Chattanooga at the time. Reports in the Chattanooga Times said the former leaders had begun going public with allegations of abuse, including child abuse and member abuse.

In December 1979, Spriggs’ sister, Joyce Henrickson, told the Chattanooga Times that she was initially pleased with her brother’s service.

“But then they looked very negative,” she said. “When I mentioned it to him, he told me he was just trying to follow the scriptures in his work.”

Henrickson also said she visited a church house and the babies there did not look healthy and the living conditions were crowded.

The group has been the subject of ongoing investigations and documentaries by organizations such as Pacific Standard, Southern Poverty Law Center and A&E, as well as the topic of books by former members. Many of these works claimed systematic child abuse and child labor promoted by group leaders and justified by Bible passages. The group has admitted to punishing children with wooden sticks, quoting a passage from the Book of Proverbs, but denied the other allegations.

The group has also been accused of racism and the promotion or worship of slavery, with some lessons made public suggesting that the group believes black people are inferior to the Bible in ways similar to how many American Christian churches justified slavery during the Civil War. .

The Twelve Tribes denounce what they see as a society that violates God’s “natural law,” namely, “the honorable ideals of the time of a zealous husband, submissive wife, and respected children,” according to the group’s website.

In 1984, more than 100 Vermont state troops and social workers expelled children from the community seeking evidence of child abuse in what the Twelve Tribes refer to as the “Raid” in its literature. Many of the child-related cases were dismissed when parents refused to give their children names, according to The New York Times.

An allegation involving the sexual exploitation of children, made at the Alexander County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina in 2013 was forwarded to the FBI for investigation. No official charges were filed, according to the sheriff’s office.

In 2018, the New York Department of Labor found numerous child labor violations involving a dozen children at the group’s Farm Sense Common in Cambridge, New York.

Spriggs death certificate lists respiratory arrest as its leading cause of death and hypoxemic respiratory failure, congestive heart disease, and atrial fibrillation as contributing causes.

The private nature of the Twelve Tribes and their beliefs make it unclear what role Spriggs played in the group near the end of his life or what his death meant to the international movement. According to the group’s website, Spriggs received the revelation but was one of many teachers. Calls to the organization’s communities in Chattanooga and Hiddenite for several days did not return.

Even Luke Wiseman, whose father Eddie Wiseman was a founding member and is among the remaining leaders, I do not know. Luke Wiseman and his wife, both members of the Twelve Tribes, were among hundreds who left the group after several issues were uncovered involving ministry leaders around 2008, he said.

“There is an iron curtain between the Twelve Tribes and those of us who have left,” Luke told the Wiseman Times Free Press last week. “They consider us dead. They consider us as Judas Iscariot.”

A message left last week to Eddie Wiseman, who still lives in Chattanooga, did not return.

People who studied the group for years, such as Robert Pardon, director of the New England Institute for Religious Research, said the idea that the group had no leaders is not true. Spriggs was supposed to lead the group until Jesus Christ returned, Pardon said.

“Nothing was done except Spriggs,” he said last week. “He should never have died. This is not someone who was one of many. What he said, went.”

Forgiveness is considered an enemy of the Tribes for his work helping former members move away from the group and back into mainstream society. He has studied the group and played an integral role in uncovering some of the most serious allegations of abusive practices.

The Twelve Tribes have been a target of “programming” groups seeking to remove members from similar groups, often at the request of their families. In 2015, three people were arrested for abducting a family member who had joined the Twelve Tribes.

Pardon said he expects the group’s businesses can continue but can struggle without a unifying spiritual leader.

“In general, what happens to groups like the Tribes is that they can go on for a generation or two, but they end up simply dying because there is no one to take the revelation,” Pardon said. “This is what I expect to happen.”

Despite dozens of former members describing stories of abuse within the community, the Twelve Tribes continues to operate its series of Yellow Deli restaurants, the New York farm, a Massachusetts-based construction company and a printing business.

Pardon said that while the group has faced some violations and surveillance by the government, it often remains alone because of its hospitable businesses and non-confrontational attitude with the public. Members do not appear to pose a threat to wider society, as a white supremacist group would do or collect weapons, Pardon said. At the same time, gathering evidence to prove abuse or ill-treatment is difficult as members do not own the property.

In 1974, Spriggs told the News-Free Press about his dreams of opening more restaurants and community homes.

“Can you imagine what a wonderful thing it would be to have Yellow Delis all over America?” Said Spriggs at the time. “A restaurant with good food for everyone in the community, but it would be a place to reach all the fugitives who are passing by, or all the young people who are tired and nauseous. These people will not go to “Sometimes they stop at shelters and instructions that people beat around the bush. They do not simply show it as it is. Jesus loves you. You can be happy. Let God guide your life.”

Contact Wyatt Massey at [email protected] or 423-757-6249. Follow him on Twitter @news4mass.