A Week with the Twelve Tribes: 12 Lessons from the 12 Tribes (Part 2 of 2)

Garrett and Lauren Smith have been traveling around Australia for the last four months working on organic farms through the WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) program. A recent farm visit in the Sydney area brought them to a community of the Twelve Tribes (www.twelvetribes.com), a Messianic religious movement of people living communally in various countries, including the U.S. and Australia. Although milking goats had been the attraction of the farm stay, Garrett and Lauren were confronted with a very different, sometimes bewildering, view of life and religious doctrine. Last week, they shared an article in which they introduced the Twelve Tribes religious movement and reflected upon their experiences from living a week with a community in the Tribe of Asher. This second article identifies the positive aspects of the community life they observed, which they intend to apply to improve their own life of religion. -Editor

Last week, we gave a little expose of what life was like in the Twelve Tribes. We tried to keep the account as unbiased as possible. Doubtless, the reader noted some large divergences in doctrine. There were, and this week we’d like to emphasize some of the contrasts. However, instead of a lengthy discourse on the legitimacy of their dogma vs. ours, we’d like to focus instead on the good qualities that we observed within the community. Amidst all the dissension, we found some valuable lessons to apply to our own lives in the New Church. Here are the twelve positive points we learned from a week with the Twelve Tribes (an unintended coincidence of number, I assure you) that we invite you to consider as well.

1.Members of the Twelve Tribes actively and officially acknowledge the Lord and their need of His presence in their lives two times a day, every day of the week.

Every morning and evening at 7:00, the community members lay aside whatever they may be doing (or thinking about) and gather together to acknowledge the Lord. They sing and dance, read the Bible and have doctrinal lessons, and close each session with a group prayer.

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A Week with the Twelve Tribes: Are we really living what we believe? (Part 1 of 2)

Garrett and Lauren Smith have been traveling around Australia for the last four months working on organic farms through the WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) program. A recent farm visit in the Sydney area brought them to a community of the Twelve Tribes (www.twelvetribes.com), a Messianic religious movement of people living communally in various countries, including the U.S. and Australia. Although milking goats had been the attraction of the farm stay, Garrett and Lauren were confronted with a very different, sometimes bewildering, view of life and religious doctrine. In a two-part article series, they reflect upon their experiences from living a week with a community in the Tribe of Asher and the lessons they learned to apply to their own life of religion. -Editor

A Brief Introduction to the Twelve Tribes

Picton, NSW, is a pleasant little farming town south of Sydney with the typical Aussie mix of crops, sheep, and cattle. One of the last stops on Sydney's CityRail train line, we arrived one afternoon shortly after Easter to do a farm stay at an agriculture-based, sustainable living community in the area. Expecting Scott at the train station, whom we had been in contact with via e-mail, we were instead met by a man named Yelid who had a big beard and hair pulled back into a pony tail. When we arrived at the site of the bakery/cafe and old-style hotel owned by the community, currently being used as residence for some of the members, we realized that ALL the men sported full beards and ponytails. We were introduced to some of the Twelve Tribe members over a big lump of rising sourdough bread... Yocef, Ehriz, Naaman, Qeshab. We were served a delicious lunch in the cafe by a woman wearing harem (or parachute) pants straight off of Disney's Princess Jasmine (minus the exposed midriff, of course). When we were delivered to the farm that evening, we realized that ALL the women wore harem pants. The women also had mind-twisting names to try to remember: Seetsza, Anava, Shalem, Rivka; all Hebrew, all with specific meanings, all given by the community to reflect each members' character.

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Dating “Outside” the Church

In this article Garrett Smith explores his changing attitude toward dating "outside" of the New Church. Like Meryl Cowley a couple weeks ago in Spirituality in Relationships, Garrett concludes that spanning differences of religious background with romantic interest offers some unique benefits as well as challenges. - Editor

So… who am I, and what does dating “outside” the church mean? First, a little background:

I grew up in about as New Church a family as they come. As a preacher’s kid, I had the privilege of living the gypsy-esque lifestyle that is normal for any preacher’s family—in our case moving from Mitchellville, MD to Westville, South Africa before finally ending up in Kempton, PA. Through these moves, the New Church was always strong focus in our day-to-day life and I remember that our family had worship most weeknights at home and went to church pretty much every Sunday. (Religiously you might even say.)

For schooling, all three of my older brothers ended up going to “normal”, public schools—although they might disagree with calling the uniformed, British, all-boys, public high school that they went to, “normal”. I on the other hand managed to skip public school all together. Through careful planning started as a 5-year-old, I managed to go from Washington New Church School to Kainon New Church School to Kempton New Church School to The Academy of the New Church finally ending up at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church for freshman and sophomore year of college. (You may notice a common suffix to all of these school titles.)

With religion classes standard in the curriculums of all of the above, I mention my schooling only as a preface to illustrate the pervasiveness of New Church teachings that I was exposed to by the end of sophomore year in college. The specific doctrine relevant to this particular story is that by this stage I was very familiar with was: you should not marry outside of the church. The very reasonable reason for this being that having the same religion is the most important criteria to be sure of when getting married. This being the case, it’s probably best to not even date outside of the church.

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