What does Tribe teach about change in church?
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 change in church starts with Jesus's own images: new wine, old wineskins, a patch of new cloth on a worn garment. Brian walked the congregation through Luke 5 and Matthew 9, where followers of John the Baptist challenge Jesus about why his disciples do not fast the way they do. Rather than skip past the apparent disconnect between a question about fasting and an answer about fabric and fermentation, Brian asked the room to sit with it, because Jesus was drawing people into something deeper the way a parable does.
The teaching holds two meanings for new wine together. The specific one is the new covenant itself, a way of being made right with God through faith rather than law-keeping. Brian pointed to Matthew 5:17 and Romans 3 to show that Jesus came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, opening a new way that does not depend on keeping the law's requirements. For people who have followed Jesus for years, Brian noted, those words can slide past without landing. He asked the room to try reading them as someone stuck in the exhausting rut of trying to earn God's approval, and reminded them that saying these things out loud is what got both Jesus and Paul killed. The more general meaning is that new wine represents any new way God is moving, and the congregation observed that the Holy Spirit expanding and fermenting inside a rigid, routine-bound structure is exactly what causes the old skin to burst.
The question Luke's text raises honestly, that no one who has been drinking old wine wants the new because they say the old is better, came up in the room and Brian held it without flattening it. Part of what emerged is that without the Holy Spirit, a person simply cannot see clearly enough to recognize or want what God is doing. The congregation also worked through what it looks like to move scripture from information to something that actually changes a person. Brian put it plainly: Brian says, "It is not until God's word makes that 18 inches drop from your thinker into your knower that it has any ability to change your life."
Taught from Luke 5:33-39 · Matthew 9:14-17 · Romans 3:21-23 · Matthew 5:17 · Romans 8:1
“It is not until God's word makes that 18 inches drop from your thinker into your knower that it has any ability to change your life.”
From New Wine
The passage taught · Luke 5:33-39
33 They said to him, “Why do John’s disciples often fast and pray, likewise also the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink?”
34 He said to them, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast, while the bridegroom is with them?
35 But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. Then they will fast in those days.”
36 He also told a parable to them. “No one puts a piece from a new garment on an old garment, or else he will tear the new, and also the piece from the new will not match the old.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- November 11, 2024 New Wine Jesus explains new wine and new wineskins in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. Brian Hunter leads a conversation on what it means to receive the new things God is doing.
- November 10, 2024 What Does The New Wine Represent Brian Hunter walks through Jesus's words on new wine and old wineskins, asking what it looks like when God moves in new ways and whether we are ready to receive it.