What does Tribe teach about second coming?

At Tribe, the teaching on the second coming starts with the prophetic texts most Christians skip. Brian Connolly has returned more than once to Habakkuk 3 and Isaiah 35 as passages that describe the return of Jesus in concrete, physical terms, not as metaphor to be tidied away. In a January 2024 message he walked the congregation through both chapters together and argued that the clues are in the text itself: Isaiah 35:4 says God "will come" with vengeance and salvation, pointing to an event still ahead, and Habakkuk's description of rays of light flashing from God's hands has not happened in recorded history. Brian pressed into the specific geography of that return, a procession moving up through the desert wilderness toward the promised land, and connected it to multiple Old Testament prophecies that picture Jesus returning along a corridor from the south before setting foot on the Mount of Olives.

A later message, from November 2024, came at the same theme from a different angle. Brian preached from John 7 and pointed out that verse 31, the moment when many in the crowd believed in Jesus, does not sit in a calm scene. Around it there is grumbling, accusations of fraud, charges of demon possession, fear, and widespread confusion. His argument was that Christians who only know the Jesus of verse 31 carry a picture too small to hold the full biblical portrait, and that same too-small picture will leave them caught off guard when things get hard. He named the felt-board Sunday school version of Jesus and said that image cannot hold a Habakkuk 3:5 Jesus, even though that Jesus is in the same Bible. The practical stakes he drew were immediate: people anchored to the larger picture of who Jesus is and what he will do are the ones who can stay steady when the surface-level world is in chaos.

The December 2023 series on Isaiah 62 connected the second coming to prayer and watchfulness. Brian taught that God himself posts watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, not the community, and that God is raising up a generation to pray without rest until the second advent, much the way he prepared hearts in the generation before the first arrival of Jesus. Anna praying in the temple, Simeon waiting, John the Baptist on the scene: Brian said he believes God is doing something similar now, stirring people toward that same posture of alert expectation.

Taught from Habakkuk 3:1-4 · Habakkuk 3:5-19 · Isaiah 35:1-8 · Isaiah 62:1-11 · John 7:31