What does Tribe teach about purpose?
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 purpose starts with a simple but disorienting claim: loneliness is not really about needing more people or more plans. Brian walked the room through John 21 and Peter's midnight return to his fishing nets after the resurrection, and the picture he drew was of a man who had witnessed the risen Christ and still did not know what to do with himself. The night produced nothing. Brian connected that directly to his own years in Estes Park, where he had friends, mountains, and adventures, and a loneliness he could not shake no matter how full his calendar got. When he finally asked God about it, the answer was that the loneliness was tied to not yet knowing his identity and purpose. He puts it plainly: "The loneliness light blinking on your emotional dashboard is not actually because you're just lonely, but it is a symptom of your lack of identity and purpose."
Brian draws a careful line between three things people tend to scramble together: identity, calling, and gifting. Your identity is who you are as God's child, and nothing can take that. Your calling is the unique assignment God wrote into your life before you lived a single day, the one Psalm 139 describes. Your gifting is the specific capacity God gave you to carry that calling out. The danger he keeps returning to is that a person can spend an entire life exercising their gifting for their own kingdom and stand before God one day with nothing that survives. Purpose, in this teaching, is not about finding the right career or feeling fulfilled. It is about doing what God specifically assigned to you, and doing it for His kingdom rather than your own.
The invitation Brian describes is almost always quiet. Jesus on the shore did not announce himself. He just called out a suggestion about where to throw the net. Brian compared that to Moses at the burning bush, where God did not make a dramatic entrance either. Moses had to choose to turn aside. Brian says the same kind of moment comes to people who are running on empty, and the question Jesus put to Peter applies just as directly: are you going to keep going back to the nets, or are you going to step into who God has named and called you to be? As Brian puts it, "Paradise without purpose is prison."
Taught from John 21 · Psalm 139:16 · 2 John 1:8 · 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 · Proverbs 25:2
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 3:10-15
10 According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another builds on it. But let each man be careful how he builds on it.
11 For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.
12 But if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or stubble;
13 each man’s work will be revealed. For the Day will declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself will test what sort of work each man’s work is.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- August 24, 2025 Wood, Hay, and Straw A Wyoming pastor and congregation explore what it means to build a life of lasting purpose, asking what God will make of the work we did with the time we had.
- July 22, 2024 Paradise Without Purpose Is Prison Brian Hunter explores loneliness through John 21, showing how Peter's emptiness points to a deeper hunger for identity and purpose that only Jesus can fill.
- July 21, 2024 A Message For... Brian Hunter speaks from John 21 about how loneliness often points not to isolation but to a missing sense of identity and purpose, and how Jesus restores both.
Mentioned along the way
- March 27, 2023 Turn the Cat around Week 6 A ski instructor shares how God rebuilt his life from the ground up, and a Wyoming congregation reflects on what it means to stop running from God and turn around.