What does Tribe teach about complexity?
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 complexity starts with a conviction Brian has carried into 2024: that God never allows a complex situation to arrive without also placing clarity inside it. The image he used to describe this was a gift bag. The tissue paper is always more visible than the present, but the present is always there. As Brian puts it, "There will never be a gift bag full of lots of tissue paper complexity that god does not place a beautiful present of clarity in there." The goal is not to deny how disorienting things can get, but to learn to look past the tissue paper.
Brian has drawn this out through two different passages across the series. From John 18, he walked the congregation through the arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane and asked them to feel the actual chaos of the scene before drawing anything from it. Soldiers, a betrayal, a panicked disciple swinging a sword, and almost no one in the garden understanding what was happening. His point was that the disciples' confusion mirrors what people experience in their own lives, and that the lens you bring to a situation determines what you are able to see in it. Jesus, John says, fully realized what was coming upon him. The people around him did not. Brian connected that difference not to intelligence but to the lens of knowing who God is.
From Habakkuk 3 and Isaiah 35, Brian pressed further into that lens. He described Israel as a people who knew God's acts, while Moses knew God's character, and said the aim for the Tribe family is to respond to complexity the way Moses did, by leaning into who God is rather than being swept along by circumstances. He had spoken at the start of the year about an exponential increase in complexity coming in 2024, but said that for people with eyes to see and ears to hear, there would be a simultaneous increase in clarity running alongside it.
Taught from John 18:1-14 · Habakkuk 3:1-4 · Habakkuk 3:5-19 · Isaiah 35:1-8 · Isaiah 43:10-13
“All other ground is sinking sand.”
From The Lens, the Light, and the Landscape
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, I will bring the discernment of the discerning to nothing.”
20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the lawyer of this world? Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
21 For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom didn’t know God, it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save those who believe.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 19, 2024 The Lens, the Light, and the Landscape Brian Hunter walks through John 18 to show how the right lens, light, and footing in Jesus bring clarity when life gets complicated and overwhelming.
- January 21, 2024 Clarity In Complexity Part 2 A Wyoming pastor draws on Habakkuk and Isaiah to show how worship brings clarity when life grows complex, pointing to signs of Christ's return along the way.