What does Tribe teach about fear and complexity?
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 fear and complexity starts with a simple but grounding conviction: God never allows a complex situation to arrive without also attaching a measure of clarity to it. Brian has named the season many people are living through as genuinely hard, marked by global instability, personal upheaval, and the kind of circumstances that can feel like too much to hold. But his argument is that difficulty is not the end of the story. The complexity is real, but so is the gift inside it. The image he kept returning to was a gift bag: the tissue paper is the complexity, and it is always more plentiful and more visible than the actual gift. Many people get stuck sorting through the tissue paper and never reach what God placed at the bottom of the bag.
Brian also taught that the lens a person is using to read a situation matters enormously. In walking through the arrest of Jesus in John 18, he pointed out that the soldiers saw a criminal, the disciples saw a threat to be fought off, and Jesus was the only one in the scene who fully understood what was unfolding. Fear tends to narrow that lens. It locks people into what they can see in front of them and makes it harder to recognize what God is actually doing. Brian said, "As the world gets increasingly more complex, as Christians, there is an invitation from the Holy Spirit for us to pursue simplicity." That simplicity is not naivety. It is the practical path toward clarity, a decision to stop sorting endless tissue paper and look for what God has placed underneath it.
The congregation also worked through Luke 24 together and found that clarity is often not brand new information. Hannah drew attention to the angel reminding the women of words Jesus had already spoken, the point being that what cuts through fear and confusion is frequently something that was always there, waiting to be recognized. Jonathan put it plainly: when the disciples spoke among themselves they had no clarity, but when Jesus spoke, clarity came. That pattern, clarity arriving not through human effort but through attention to what God has already said, sits at the center of what Tribe teaches about navigating fear and complexity.
Taught from John 18:1-14 · Luke 24:1-49 · Isaiah 43:10-13 · Isaiah 46:3-4 · Psalm 37:34
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, I will bring the discernment of the discerning to nothing.”
20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the lawyer of this world? Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
21 For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom didn’t know God, it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save those who believe.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 18, 2024 The Lens, The Light, and The Landscape Brian Hunter walks through John 18 to show how the right lens, light, and footing in Jesus can bring clarity when life gets complicated and overwhelming.
- January 15, 2024 Clarity in Complexity Brian Hunter preaches on finding clarity in complexity, walking through Luke 24 and the risen Jesus bringing understanding to confused disciples on the road to Emmaus.