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28 years ago my wife and I were very poor, expecting our first child, and stuck in Oregon with no money to get back home to Tennessee where our home was. We had made tentative arrangements with a Doctor in TN to deliver our baby but had never met him yet. After befriending an old man in Oregon that was marginalized by many of the people in the local church we began spending a lot of time at his very tiny house cleaning it up and trying to organize all his stuff. He did not see very well so the house was in terrible shape with all of his belongings and clothes mixed up everywhere, the shades pulled down and mold growing rampant on the walls. I did not have any work at the time so we both invested most of our time working on cleaning and organizing his house while enjoying his company. He was actually very knowledgeable health, diet and many other things. He had made friends of some of the students at the local university where he worked picking up trash who sometimes came over to learn from him. His kitchen was so narrow that if you wanted to pass anyone, then everyone had to exit the kitchen and rearrange the order and then go back in.
When we finally got the house pretty well clean we realized that it needed painting after cleaning the mold away. I called his landlord and asked if he would be willing to pay for the paint and some simple equipment to paint it with. I was a painter but did not have any tools with me. The landlord not only offered to pay for the paint but insisted he would pay for my services as well.
This was a God-send for us, for we desperately needed the money to go back home before our daughter was born.
Not long after we did leave for home, stopping for a week in Colorado to work a little more and stay with relatives. I so much wanted to just stay there it was so beautiful, but with my wife eight months pregnant we felt we should take the money we earned and go on home.
On the way home we stopped to see the doctor that we had arranged with to deliver our baby. After visiting with him for awhile we both felt strongly that we did not want him involved in the birth. Everything in his protocol revolved around his convenience and we were very uncomfortable with his spirit. However, this put us into a deep quandary with the baby due almost any day and no doctor and no money.
At this point I back up in time to explain about a Community based in Chattanooga that lived very much like the New Testament Christians, sharing everything in common and worshiping with joy, living in community as believers. They had started up a number of small deli's called The Yellow Deli and were a delight to be around. We used to enjoy (when we could squeeze out enough money) dropping in especially on Saturday nights when they would have live music, Jewish-style dancing and various craftsmen while the patrons watched from the main floor or the balcony reached by a spiral staircase. I was always to timid to join in the dancing but we enjoyed watching them.
We knew that this Community delivered all their own babies and many of the mothers would help each other by nursing their babies while taking turns working for the Community. It seemed a bit strange to many people but we found it somewhat intriguing. After we had been home back from Oregon for a short time and had received no useful ideas as to what we could do about our predicament after approaching the local church and others, we decided to approach the Community from the Yellow Deli and see if there was any possibility that they could help us.
They sat down with us and began asking us questions like, how did we feel about home births, what were our convictions in this area, etc. I had never really thought about it so I did not have any strong convictions. I thought it was a neat idea but did not hold it as a strong belief.
At first they were very reluctant to assist us. This was understandable given the growing tension in the area against them by the local religious community. A very large Baptist college just a few blocks away had but an emphatic ban on any of their students ever stepping foot into their restaurants or Community on pain of expulsion. Other churches in the area had begun to spread slanderous reports about them and things were not looking well for them in that town.
But after visiting with us for awhile the leaders softened their face toward us and became more sympathetic with our plight. They were a bit shocked when they asked us when the baby was due and we told them it was due right now. They agreed to let their midwives help us deliver the baby at home on condition that we read the book they recommended to us called Birth Without Violence and another book that I cannot now remember. I did read the book which strongly influenced my feelings and convictions about home birth. They also gave us a list of simple materials that we needed to purchase and prepare before the birth. When they learned that we did not have any money whatsoever they even gave us 20-30 dollars to purchase them.
Two weeks later our first daughter was born in the evening after several hours of labor. There were probably 4-5 midwives there at least helping out with one of them there to nurse another one's baby. We had a very wonderful experience watching and helping with the birth and felt honored to be able to make her first memories of the outside world with her family in our own house with such kind people in attendance.
Not long after this things turned much worse for the Community. The local churches whipped up the prejudice of their members and the city against this Community spreading blatant lies about them even on television. Parents of one of the girls about to be married in the Community were so paranoid that they even hired a professional to literally kidnap her and hold her in an abandoned house for many days while they imposed intense psychological “deprogramming” on her until she was willing to say she did not love the man she was to marry and leave the Community. After a series of such incidents the Community closed all of their Deli's, sold their houses and moved to Vermont where they had already established another Community. After that I was never to here of their whereabouts again in spite of repeated attempts to track them down over the past 28 years.
Now we are living in Illinois with our latest “adopted” daughter staying with us. This daughter decided a couple weeks ago to hop into a truck that the son of a friend of ours was delivering to Colorado who had stopped by for the night. She traveled with him out there while he talked nearly non-stop in his excitement at having a new friend, which created its own problems at times. After they delivered the truck in Colorado he bought her a bus ticket to return back home while he took a bus back to Indiana to pick up another vehicle. The ticket she got sent her on a two or three day trip down through NM and TX before getting back to Illinois.
While she was sitting at the bus stop in Albuquerque, NM she notice a man sitting across the room who seemed to have a lot of peace about his countenance. He noticed her as well and after awhile came over to visit with her commenting about her spirit that he could see. He said he was on his way to a commune in Colorado called the Twelvetribes where everyone shared things in common and treated each other in Christian love. After leaving the room he returned and handed her his card commenting that he didn't know why he was giving it to her but just felt impressed that he should.
After she arrived back home she looked up the commune that he had told her about with the internet information he had given her and bookmarked it for me to look at. She thought I might be interested since we have been learning a lot about the importance of community and relationships over the past few years.
So yesterday I decided to look into what she had found. I went to the website and found listings of maybe thousands of intentional communities all over the world of every kind imaginable. I looked under Twelvetribes and found a listing of 36 communities by that name. As I looked through the list I noticed that there was one in Chattanooga. This peaked my curiosity so I clicked on the link to check it out.
Just the day before I had received an answer to my email query to a church in TX called the Vine Church wondering if they had any roots in Chattanooga. I remember hearing the name Vine in connection with the Yellow Deli and had run across this church on the web while trying to track down one of the speakers we saw on video last weekend at the Marriage Covenant weekend we attended. The pastor wrote back that they had never been in Chattanooga, that they had started up in TX many years ago. So I dismissed one more attempt to trace down the people we had met so many years ago.
As I began reading the web site for the Twelvetribes Community I began to get very excited. It was starting to look very much like they might have links to the original group we had known before. I quickly skipped to the page in their history about Chattanooga and was overjoyed to discover that it was the very same people. They had recently returned to town and are planning to open a new Yellow Deli as soon as things work out. I was so excited I could hardly take time to read much of the other history except to find our where they had moved to when they left town.
At this point I determined that I had to talk to someone in this new establishment and find out if any of the same people were there, especially any of the midwives. So I picked up the phone and called the number in Chattanooga. A lady answered the phone and I asked her if this was the Twelvetribe Community. She assured me it was and I began explaining to her why I was calling. It turned out that the lady I was talking with was one of the original members of the Community and was living there when we met them. She personally knew all the midwives and gave me their names, which definitely sounded very familiar even though I am terrible remembering names.
As we talked she herself began getting more excited. When I told her that they had delivered our daughter I'm not sure if she believed me or not. She told me that during that time they had only delivered three babies outside their Community. Then as her excitement grew, she relayed to me that she had been visiting with an Herbalist associated with Wildwood where my sister had lived at the time we were living down there. She had been talking with him since last June but he did not know her association with the Community. Then one day last December when she went in to see him she dropped off a sheet of paper talking about their Community and the Yellow Deli. When he saw the reference to the Yellow Deli he became very excited. He told her that their midwives had delivered his daughter during that time and he did not know they were around again.
When this lady relayed this to one of the midwives who is now living there again she was overjoyed at finding one of the families they had helped. As we talked, we were both excited that now two out of three of the families they had delivered for had now reconnected with them and we wondered if maybe the third might be found as well.
Since my wife was working an extra-long shift she was not with me in the conversation. I asked all kinds of questions about their community life, their history and their experiences. I did not have near enough time to ask most of the questions but I told them we would love to see them again. She assured me that we were welcome any time and they would have a room for us. I believe we would love to take them up on that.
Their communities are now multiplied all over the world. They are open and welcoming to visitors who are free to stay and participate and observe community life. Something about this is very magnetic to the soul. We were all designed in our hearts to live in transparent community with each other in the family of God. Religious perversions over the centuries have all but obliterated the experience of the early New Testament Church believers. And while many have attempted to replicate what they read about that time, it almost always fails because it is mixed with false ideas about leadership and ends up stirring in the element of force, intimidation or deception to achieve the desired appearance.
But I firmly believe that God will arrange circumstances so that once again it will be seen that His body on earth can live in harmony, community and love for each other that has not been seen since early A.D. It will not be imposed on anyone or carefully managed by power-brokers looking for influence. It will occur most likely in the strangest ways and come out of traumatic events putting together some of the most unexpected people in the world's eyes (and that includes the “religious” people).God will arrange people in connections that He has been preparing them for individually over time to be perfectly linked to others who have been prepared to perfectly compliment their strengths and weaknesses.
I believe that there are communities today that may be approaching somewhat that design. To the extent that they are willing to be humble and led by the true Spirit of God, they will more and more reflect and remind us of the original church in the early days of the Apostles, full of the passion of God and overflowing with rivers of love and compassion for those around them. I'm hungry for it. I crave it and want to not only see it in action but to be fully embraced in it. I'm not saying that these Twelvetribes communities are doing this. I know very little about them at this point. But I detect a sincerity and see some of the symptoms of genuineness that I believe will result from experiencing real community in the family of God.
So that is my story today. I am eager to share it with more of my family and especially my daughter that was the one involved. I am hoping that it will not be too long before we will have a chance to met them in person. And in the meantime, I intend to spend some time on the phone learning more details and renewing bonds that we were afraid were lost forever.
P.S. If you are curious about learning more about this Community you can read about them on the web at www.twelvetribes.org
