What does Tribe teach about belonging?
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 belonging starts with a claim Brian Hunter says is easy to glance at but hard to actually take in: that God has lavished love on us and called us his children, and that is what we are. In the July 2025 message from 1 John 3:1-3, Brian pointed to the opening word of the passage and noted that the Greek behind it carries the idea of joyful, confident expectation, not a quick look but a sustained considering that lets the truth become part of you. The identity on offer is not provisional or earned. As Brian put it, "He has written your name on the palm of his hand."
Both messages return to the same underlying problem: people accept names placed on them by the world or the enemy rather than the name God has already written. In the John 21 message, Brian described Peter falling back on fishing after the resurrection, filling a void with something that could not fill it, and connected that drift to not yet knowing one's purpose or identity. When Jesus meets Peter on the shore, he uses the birth name Simon rather than Peter, pressing directly into the question of which person Peter was going to be. The same pattern shows up in the 1 John message, where Brian warned that the world cannot recognize God's children for the simple reason that it does not know him, and where a woman named Joy observed that people tend to speak identities over others that serve their own comfort rather than seeing through God's eyes. Brian's word against that pressure was direct: "Don't let the world try to paint over his name on your heart."
The belonging Brian teaches is also honest about what is not yet complete. He spent real time on the tension in 1 John 3:2 between what we already are and what has not yet been fully revealed. We are already God's children, and yet what we will be when Christ appears is still unfolding. That is not a reason for uncertainty about belonging; it is a reason for what Brian called joyful, confident expectation as the foundation of how a person walks now.
Taught from 1 John 3:1-3 · John 21:1-25 · Isaiah 49:16 · Luke 5:1-11 · Exodus 3:1-4
“If you refuse to be conformed into his image and likeness, then by default, you pervert and transform Jesus into your image and likeness.”
From What Great Love
The passage taught · 1 John 3:1-3
1 See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us, because it didn’t know him.
2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be. But we know that, when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is.
3 Everyone who has this hope set on him purifies himself, even as he is pure.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 21, 2025 What Great Love Brian Hunter asks a simple question: if someone looked at the sole of your heart's boot, whose name would they find written there?
- 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.