What does Tribe teach about church birthday?

At Tribe, the church's own birthday has become a recurring moment to ask the most important question a congregation can ask: who is actually doing the building? On Tribe's sixth birthday, Brian preached from 1 Chronicles 17, where David decides on his own that God deserves a proper house and gets Nathan's immediate blessing, only for God to send Nathan back that same night to correct them both. Brian drew the room into David's likely discomfort at that correction, and held up what the passage actually reveals: that good intentions, even possibly God-given ones, can still get out ahead of the Lord. As Brian put it, "David started seated in his own understanding, in his own wisdom, his own palace, his own kingdom that he had created." The movement the whole chapter makes is from that kind of seated posture, settled in your own achievements, to David sitting before God, which is where Tribe has tried to stay.

On Tribe's eighth birthday, Brian used Jesus' teaching on new wine and old wineskins from Luke 5 to look honestly at what the years since COVID had actually produced in the church. His argument was not that Tribe did everything right, but that the Lord used that disrupted season to pour out new wine across the church worldwide, and that receiving it required building something new rather than scrambling back to what existed before. Wineskins, Brian said, are not handed out freely. Something has to die for one to be made. He named eight things the Holy Spirit has been shaping in Tribe through that process, from the conversational way the church gathers, to a cultivated relationship with the Holy Spirit, to an honest reckoning with what it means to have oil in your own lamp rather than borrowing it from someone else.

Running through both of these birthday messages is a warning Brian has named plainly: "Many a work that was begun in the spirit ends in the flesh." The birthday, for Tribe, is less a celebration of what the church has built and more a checkpoint to ask whether Jesus is still the senior pastor, whether the congregation is still seated before the Lord rather than running ahead of him, and whether they are willing to keep making room for what God is pouring out.

Taught from 1 Chronicles 17:1-16 · Luke 5:33-39 · Matthew 25 · 2 Corinthians 9:6 · Ecclesiastes 3:1