What does Tribe teach about depression?
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 depression does not start with a technique or a program. It starts with an observation about how God wired human beings and what can happen when worship is treated as something more than a Sunday ritual. Brian Hunter teaches that worship has a combat function, and he grounds it in 1 Samuel 16, where a tormenting spirit troubled Saul and the music David played drove it away. The point Brian draws from that passage is that the dark thing people often feel dogging them has a spiritual dimension, and pressing into worship can operate like a weapon against it. Brian says, "In his presence is fullness of joy. There can be no darkness in his presence."
This means that for someone in a low or heavy season, the teaching here is not simply to feel better about themselves but to move toward the presence of God, because that presence is where the heaviness loses its grip. A woman in the congregation reinforced this from her own experience: on October 7, surrounded by frightening news while in Israel, she and her husband began singing a worship song about being surrounded, and peace came over them in the middle of it. Brian treats that kind of story not as an exception but as an illustration of what worship is designed to do.
Brian also teaches that every person already worships something, because God built that capacity into human beings from the start. Before someone knows Jesus, that devotion tends to attach to lesser things and ultimately to the self. The problem with worshiping yourself, Brian notes, is that you cannot worship a broken God, and your own flaws have to stay hidden to keep the whole thing intact. What the teaching at Tribe points toward is that reorienting worship toward the Lord is not just a spiritual discipline but a reordering of what a person was actually made for, and that reordering has real consequences for the weight a person carries.
Taught from 1 Samuel 16:14-23 · 1 Samuel 30:1-8 · Psalm 91 · Psalm 150
“Everybody does it. Few people know that they do it.”
From Three Uses of Worship
The passage taught · 1 Samuel 16:14-23
14 Now Yahweh’s Spirit departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from Yahweh troubled him.
15 Saul’s servants said to him, “See now, an evil spirit from God troubles you.
16 Let our lord now command your servants who are in front of you to seek out a man who is a skillful player on the harp. Then when the evil spirit from God is on you, he will play with his hand, and you will be well.”
17 Saul said to his servants, “Provide me now a man who can play well, and bring him to me.”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- June 9, 2025 Three Uses of Worship Brian Hunter walks through Psalm 150 and three reasons to worship God through song: as a weapon in combat, a tool for recalibration, and a response to celebration.
- June 8, 2025 Worship in the Key of C A Wyoming pastor explores worship as more than singing, walking through Scripture to show how praise can be used for combat, calibration, and celebration.