What does Tribe teach about belonging?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on belonging starts with a single claim: that God has named you as his child, and that name is not up for debate. Brian Hunter opened his July 2025 message from 1 John 3:1-3 by drawing attention to the very first word of the passage, a Greek word that carries the sense of joyful, confident expectation. The point was not to glance at a nice idea but to let it settle into you. God has lavished love on us and called us his children, and as Brian put it, God says do not doubt this. That identity is already true, even while what we will fully become has not yet been revealed.
The teaching does not leave belonging as a warm feeling. Brian pressed on what it means to hold that identity in a world that cannot recognize it, because the world does not know God. He described a tension he sees at work: people speak identities over others that serve their own comfort, painting over what God has already written. His word for that was direct. Brian says, "If you refuse to be conformed into his image and likeness, then by default, you pervert and transform Jesus into your image and likeness." The alternative is to receive and protect the name God has given. As Brian put it, "He has written your name on the palm of his hand," and the charge that followed was plain: "Don't let the world try to paint over his name on your heart."
The July 2024 message from John 21 approached belonging from a different angle, tracing Peter's return to his fishing nets after the resurrection as a picture of what happens when a person loses their footing in purpose and identity. Brian connected that to his own years in Estes Park, where a persistent loneliness ran beneath a life that looked full from the outside. The answer he eventually received was that the loneliness was tied to not yet knowing his purpose or his identity. When Jesus appears on the shore and calls Peter by his birth name, Simon, Brian read that as Jesus asking a pointed question: are you going to stay who you were, or are you going to be who I have called you to be? That moment, Brian said, is what it looks like when Jesus speaks identity and purpose directly over someone who has lost their footing.
Taught from 1 John 3:1-3 · John 21:1-25 · Isaiah 49:16 · Exodus 3:1-4
“If you refuse to be conformed into his image and likeness, then by default, you pervert and transform Jesus into your image and likeness.”
From What Great Love
The passage taught · 1 John 3:1-3
1 See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us, because it didn’t know him.
2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be. But we know that, when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is.
3 Everyone who has this hope set on him purifies himself, even as he is pure.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 21, 2025 What Great Love Brian Hunter asks a simple question: if someone looked at the sole of your heart's boot, whose name would they find written there?
- July 21, 2024 A Message For... Brian Hunter speaks from John 21 about how loneliness often points not to isolation but to a missing sense of identity and purpose, and how Jesus restores both.