What does Tribe teach about church birthday?

At Tribe, the church's birthday has been a repeated occasion to ask an honest question: who is actually doing the building here, and are we keeping pace with what God is pouring out? On the sixth birthday, Brian taught from 1 Chronicles 17, where David looks around at his own palace and decides it is time to build God a proper house. Nathan agrees immediately, and God corrects both of them the same night. Brian drew the congregation into how that moment must have felt for David, and kept returning to the idea that a good intention, maybe even a God-given one, can still get out ahead of the Lord. As he put it, "many a work that was begun in the spirit ends in the flesh." The chapter ends with David seated before the Lord rather than seated in his own kingdom, and Brian held that movement up as the posture Tribe keeps trying to return to.

On the eighth birthday, Brian used Jesus' teaching on new wine and old wineskins from Luke 5 to look back over what the previous years had actually done to the church. He argued that seasons of disruption, COVID being the clearest recent example, release new wine across the church, but receiving it requires wineskins that are genuinely new. Old ones will not hold it. He was careful to say this is not a reason to look down on churches that went a different direction. It is simply an honest account of what Tribe has been trying to do.

Both messages carry the same underlying conviction: a church's anniversary is less a moment to celebrate its own growth than a moment to recommit to Jesus as the one doing the building. Brian invited the congregation to think of Tribe's years together not as an institution accumulating momentum, but as a community trying to stay seated before the Lord, willing to let old things die so something new can be made.

Taught from 1 Chronicles 17:1-16 · Luke 5:33-39 · 2 Corinthians 9:6 · Matthew 25 · Ecclesiastes 3:1