What does Tribe teach about purpose?
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 purpose begins with a simple but unsettling diagnosis: loneliness and restlessness are not problems you solve by filling your calendar or finding the right people. Brian has taught that the loneliness signal most people feel is pointing somewhere deeper. As he put it, "The loneliness light blinking on your emotional dashboard is not actually because you're just lonely, but it is a symptom of your lack of identity and purpose." The image he returns to is Peter after the resurrection, retreating to his fishing nets and catching nothing all night. That empty net, Brian says, is what life looks like when a person is filling a void with something that cannot fill it.
Brian draws a careful line between three things people tend to scramble together: identity, calling, and gifting. Your identity is who you are as God's child. Your calling is the specific assignment written into your life before you lived a single day, the one Psalm 139 describes. Your gifting is the capacity God gave you to carry that calling out. The danger he keeps coming back to is that people build entire lives around their gifting while using it for their own ends, and the work amounts to nothing when it matters most. Purpose, in this teaching, is not about finding the right career or the right role. It is about building something that survives.
Brian also says, plainly, that "Paradise without purpose is prison." That line sits at the center of how Tribe talks about this. The invitation Jesus extends to Peter on the shore, quiet and easy to dismiss, is the same kind of invitation God still extends. It does not announce itself loudly. It requires a person to choose to turn aside, the way Moses turned aside at the burning bush. The teaching at Tribe holds that God has written a unique assignment into every person's life, and that the work of living on purpose is the work of finding it and building with it.
Taught from John 21 · Psalm 139:16 · 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 · 2 John 1:8 · Proverbs 25:2
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 3:10-15
10 According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another builds on it. But let each man be careful how he builds on it.
11 For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.
12 But if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or stubble;
13 each man’s work will be revealed. For the Day will declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself will test what sort of work each man’s work is.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- August 24, 2025 Wood, Hay, and Straw A Wyoming pastor and congregation explore what it means to build a life of lasting purpose, asking what God will make of the work we did with the time we had.
- July 22, 2024 Paradise Without Purpose Is Prison Brian Hunter explores loneliness through John 21, showing how Peter's emptiness points to a deeper hunger for identity and purpose that only Jesus can fill.
- July 21, 2024 A Message For... Brian Hunter speaks from John 21 about how loneliness often points not to isolation but to a missing sense of identity and purpose, and how Jesus restores both.
Mentioned along the way
- March 27, 2023 Turn the Cat around Week 6 A ski instructor shares how God rebuilt his life from the ground up, and a Wyoming congregation reflects on what it means to stop running from God and turn around.