What does Tribe teach about worship?

At Tribe, the teaching on worship starts with a claim that might catch people off guard: everyone already does it. Brian Hunter puts it plainly that God built into every person a mechanism that will devote allegiance, affection, and energy toward something bigger than themselves. The question is never whether you worship, but what. As Brian says, "Everybody does it. Few people know that they do it." Before someone meets Jesus, that devotion tends to land on themselves, on a person, on a cause, or on something else that cannot bear the weight. The congregation has heard that traced all the way from a woman's near-obsessive years following Bob Dylan to Brian quoting Dylan himself back to the room: it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.

Brian draws a line between three things that get blurred together. Thanksgiving is the natural response to what God does. Praise is the natural response to who God is, his character and attributes. Worship is something different again: the response to encountering the presence of God himself, and throughout Scripture that encounter tends to produce not celebration first but a kind of fear and falling down. From there the teaching has organized worship around three uses Brian calls combat, calibration, and celebration. As combat, worship functions like a weapon: in 1 Samuel 16, a tormenting spirit troubled Saul and David played the harp and the spirit left. A woman in the congregation added her own account from October 7 in Israel, where singing a worship song in the middle of crisis brought a peace that had no natural explanation. Worship as calibration reaches into 1 Samuel 30, where David, devastated and surrounded, strengthened himself in the Lord before he could take a single step forward. Lissa Hunter, teaching alongside Amanda, was direct that singing is a discipline, not a mood: you open your mouth before the feeling arrives and ask God to meet you there.

The teaching on worship also stretches toward the future. Brian has argued from Revelation 5 that the book people most avoid is, after Psalms, the one with the most songs in the entire Bible, and that its central vision is a scene of worship around the throne. He has pressed the congregation with the claim that in the generation of Jesus' return, the church will be marked by worship, a deeper revelation of who Jesus is, worship in the middle of God's judgments, and worship as the defining posture of the people who are paying attention. The goal is not a feeling or a Sunday routine but something that shapes how a person stands when the headlines and Scripture start echoing each other. As Brian and Lissa and Amanda have all said in different ways: "Let us not give casual worship to an extravagant God who has given everything for us."

Taught from Psalm 150 · Revelation 5:1-14 · 1 Samuel 16:14-23 · 1 Samuel 30:1-8 · Psalm 100:1-5