What does Tribe teach about fear of the future?

At Tribe, the teaching on fear of the future starts with an honest admission: a lot of Christians quietly avoid the passages about what is coming because they produce anxiety. Brian Hunter described a woman in the congregation who did exactly that, staying away from end-times texts until she pressed in, asked hard questions, read commentaries, and listened to others who had wrestled with the same material. When she did, the anxiety gave way to clarity, joy, and expectation. That movement, from dread toward confidence, is the invitation Brian extended to everyone in the room.

A big part of what feeds fear, Brian taught, is the 'principle of the biggest hook.' Whatever narrative is most repeated, most loudly pressed on you, or simply the only one you have heard is the one most likely to shape what you believe, whether you have thought carefully about it or not. That principle applies directly to how people absorb cultural anxiety about the future. The antidote Brian pointed to was not optimism or ignoring hard passages, but actually reading what Jesus said in Matthew 24, sitting with it, and letting the text itself reframe the conversation.

Working through Matthew 24 together as a congregation, Brian laid out the phases Jesus describes before his return, including birth pains and tribulation, and he traced the word tribulation back to the Latin tribulum, a weighted threshing sled that separates wheat from chaff. The picture is not chaos without meaning. It is a process with a purpose and an end point. The line Jesus draws about no one knowing the day or hour was not treated as a reason for dread but as a reason to hold the future with open hands, living in expectation rather than anxiety.

Taught from Matthew 24:1-43 · 1 Thessalonians / 2 Thessalonians · Matthew 25 · Revelation 22:17 and 22:20 · Hebrews 12:27-28