What does Tribe teach about encountering god?

At Tribe, the teaching on encountering God starts with the conviction that God is not distant or passive but actively present and looking for moments to meet his people. In the 'Jesus Is Alive' message, the teaching rested on the claim that what makes Christians the strangest people on earth is not a set of beliefs about a historical figure but the insistence that Jesus is actually alive right now. Brian was careful to say a person can be genuinely saved without a dramatic personal encounter with the living Jesus, but he was equally clear that when someone does encounter him in a real and present way, nothing and nobody can argue them out of it.

The 'Encounter in the Inconvenience' message pressed into how and where those encounters tend to happen. Drawing on Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, Pastor Brian kept returning to the detail that the bush was not blocking Moses's path. He could have noted it and walked on. The encounter waited on the decision to turn aside. The pattern that kept surfacing across story after story from the congregation was that the encounter was always there, hidden inside something that looked like a problem or a disruption. Brian says, 'I love to surprise my children in the midst of inconvenience.'

Pastor Brian was also careful to draw a clear line between divine inconvenience and suffering caused by sickness or abuse. Not every hard thing carries God's fingerprints as its cause. The question is not whether God caused the hard thing, but whether, in the middle of it, there is an opportunity to turn aside and recognize what he is doing. The invitation, in both messages, is the same: stop, pay attention, and step into the moment rather than plowing through it.

Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Acts 1:1-11 · John 20:19-27 · Luke 5:33-39 · Song of Solomon 3:4