What does Tribe teach about slowing down?

At Tribe, the teaching on slowing down starts not with a self-care principle but with the order God built into creation itself. Brian Hunter walked through Genesis 1 and 2 to show that Adam was created on day six, meaning his very first full day on the job was the day God had already declared as rest. God did not tell Adam to prove himself first and then rest. He said rest first, before the work of subduing and cultivating the earth had even begun. Brian puts it plainly: as he described the people of God, "As a different species, we have a different rhythm." The world's default at the start of any new season is urgency and redoubled effort, but Christians are invited into something structured the other way around.

The pattern Jesus lived out made the same point. Before his public ministry began he withdrew into the wilderness. After John the Baptist was killed, when every human instinct would have pushed toward action, Jesus got in a boat and pulled away. Even on the boat in the storm he was asleep. Brian drew on Mark 2 to show that Jesus pushed back against the Pharisees, who had turned Sabbath into a rigid religious system, by saying it was made to meet the needs of people, not the other way around. The need rest meets is real. The form does not have to be a full day off to be genuine. Brian described the same principle compressed into ordinary moments: finding a place of peace before responding, before walking into a hard conversation, before pulling out of the driveway. Rest, he said, is not a reward for finishing work. It is the starting point for it, and "Rest subordinates our will to that of the father."

The practical question Brian left the congregation with was a pointed one: "Can you rest even on day one of the job?" The 2026 series at Tribe closed its first Sunday with communion, treating that act of stopping together as a practice of exactly what the morning had been about.

Taught from Genesis 1:26 - 2:3 · Mark 2 · 2 Corinthians 5:17