What does Tribe teach about encountering god?
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 encountering God starts with the conviction that God is not distant or passive but actively present, and that He consistently chooses to show up in the middle of ordinary, inconvenient, and even uncomfortable moments. Drawing from Exodus 3, Pastor Brian pointed to Moses at the burning bush as a picture of how these encounters work: the bush was not blocking Moses's path, and he could have walked right past it. The encounter waited on the decision to turn aside. That pattern kept surfacing across story after story from Scripture and from the congregation itself. The question is never whether God is there, but whether a person is willing to stop, notice, and step toward what looks like a disruption.
Pastor Brian was also careful about something that often gets tangled up in this conversation. Not every hard thing is God's fingerprint. He said plainly that God did not cause every painful circumstance, and that conflating divine inconvenience with suffering from sickness or abuse would be a serious mistake. The question is not whether God caused the hard thing, but whether, inside it, there is an opportunity to turn aside. Brian says, "I've heard second, third hand about you, but now I had this firsthand encounter with you." That firsthand quality is exactly what the teaching keeps pointing toward: not information about God but actual meeting with Him.
In the message on the resurrection, Brian pressed the same conviction from a different angle. What makes Christians the strangest people on earth, he said, is not a set of beliefs about a historical figure but the insistence that Jesus is actually alive right now. A person can be genuinely saved without a dramatic encounter, and Brian was careful not to make experience the entry requirement. But he was equally clear that when someone does encounter the real, present Jesus, nothing and nobody can argue them out of it.
Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Acts 1:1-11 · John 20:19-27 · Luke 5:33-39 · Song of Solomon 3:4
The passage taught · 1 John 1:9
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 12, 2026 Jesus Is Alive Brian Hunter preaches on Acts 1, the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples, and what it means to actually encounter a living Savior rather than just a religion.
- October 16, 2023 Encounter in the Inconvenience A Wyoming congregation shares stories of how God meets people in life's most inconvenient moments, drawing on Moses, Job, and one another's testimonies.