What does Tribe teach about trials and faith?
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 trials and faith starts with the recognition that hard circumstances look completely different depending on whose eyes are seeing them. Brian worked through the story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his own brothers, and the whole message turned on a single word from Genesis 39: 'meanwhile.' While Jacob was mourning a son he believed was dead, and while the brothers were busy covering their tracks, God was quietly moving Joseph toward everything that would come next. The point was not that the suffering was small, but that God was at work inside it in ways none of the people involved could see.
Brian says, 'Meanwhile, God was up to something.' That posture, trusting that God is active even when circumstances look like disaster, is what Tribe's teaching holds out to anyone in a hard season. Brian also pressed honestly on the cost of that kind of faith, noting that 'few of us are willing to endure the pit or the prison where it is most magnified.' The pit and the prison are exactly the places where God's character shows up most clearly, but they are also the places people are most tempted to conclude the story is over.
The thread that runs through both messages is the same: God's record matters. Brian says, 'We can assume the best about God. There's no one else we can really do that with, even our family.' In the Joseph story, that assumption looked like faithfulness inside circumstances no one would have chosen. In the Joshua 23 message, it looked like standing on what God has already done rather than on personal wishes or fears. At Tribe, trials are not treated as evidence that God has stepped away. They are treated as the place where the 'meanwhile' is doing its quiet work.
Taught from Genesis 37 · Genesis 39:21 · Psalms 139:5-6 · James (unspecified verse) · Joshua 23:14
“Meanwhile, God was up to something.”
From God of the Meanwhile
The passage taught · Genesis 37
1 Jacob lived in the land of his father’s travels, in the land of Canaan.
2 This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father.
3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors.
4 His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, and they hated him, and couldn’t speak peaceably to him.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- September 9, 2024 God of the Meanwhile Brian Hunter walks through Genesis 37 to show how God is quietly at work behind every painful, confusing circumstance, even when the evidence seems to say otherwise.
- November 21, 2023 Pecky Day Brian Hunter shares Pecky Day, a Hunter family tradition of remembering God's faithfulness, woven through Joshua 23 and an unlikely answer to prayer in Tulsa.