What does Tribe teach about church format?
Drawn from the message 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 church format starts with the conviction that everyone wants new wine but almost nobody wants to build a new wineskin to hold it. In the Luke 5 passage, Brian Walker pointed out that Jesus himself acknowledges we are creatures of habit, reaching for the old wine because it is familiar and it worked. The problem is not that the old wine was bad. The problem is that new wine requires new wineskins, and wineskins are not handed out for free. Something has to die before a new one can be made.
Brian taught that COVID functioned as a Rubicon moment the world does not come back from, and that the Lord used that season to release new wine for his church worldwide. Most churches, he said, scrambled simply to recover what they had before and missed it. For Tribe specifically, one of the first fruits of that new wine was a different, more conversational format for meetings, one built around cultivating a real relationship with the Holy Spirit through continual conversation, listening for small nudges, obeying them, praying in your prayer language, and not forsaking gathering together. Brian was careful to say that noticing this carries a real danger of tipping into an elitist attitude, and that the point is not to look down on other churches.
Running through this teaching is a sober word about personal preparation. Using the parable of the ten virgins, Brian pressed hard on the fact that oil for your lamp cannot be borrowed or shared because it can only come through personal intimacy with God. He says, "You cannot burn your lamp off of somebody else's oil." The crushing and pressing that produces olive oil is the same process that purchases that intimacy, through small acts of surrender and obedience. And the parable does not soften what comes next. Brian says, "There will come a day where it will be too late to buy oil, and you must burn your lamp with whatever supply you have."
Taught from Luke 5:33-39 · Hebrews 10:25 · Matthew 25 · Matthew 24 · Ecclesiastes
“You cannot burn your lamp off of somebody else's oil.”
From New Wineskins for Sale
The passage taught · Hebrews 10:25
25 not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as you see the Day approaching.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- October 28, 2024 New Wineskins for Sale Brian Hunter reflects on Tribe's eight years, using Jesus' parable of new wine and wineskins to explore what the Holy Spirit has been building in this small Jackson Hole church.