TTCA Week 9 Wrap Up

This was the final message in Tribe's long-running "Turn the Cat Around" series. Brian opened the floor for the congregation to share how the series had challenged or changed them before anchoring the conversation in 2 Timothy 4:1-5. The thread running through everything was a single statement Brian said the Holy Spirit had placed on his heart: the leadership of Jesus will be less complicated but more costly.

What was said

Before Brian spoke, the congregation had an extended open time of worship and sharing. Several people spoke into the room: one man prayed about the fear of the Lord being the foundation of revival, Lissa offered a picture of a braid with a wrong thread woven into it as an image of wounds and shame needing to be unbraided before the Lord could rewrite a story, and a young man named Joe shared that he had recommitted his faith a few weeks earlier and was now building a daily habit of reading Scripture. Brian prayed over Joe, asking the Holy Spirit to send fire into his life the way Brian's own youth pastor had once prayed over him.

Brian then asked people to reflect on the series as a whole. Colleen shared that a public act of repentance she made in what Brian called roughly week one had broken something open in the congregation, and that since then more than twenty people had given their lives to the Lord. Clay shared that he had stepped away from alcohol after feeling convicted, and Kat talked about pushing past pride to share her testimony. Brian did not treat these as tidy success stories but as evidence that individual obedience has a ripple effect in the body.

The main text was 2 Timothy 4:1-5, which Brian framed with a note on context: Paul is writing to Timothy, a young man he calls his true son, who has been placed as a pastor over a church in Ephesus. The voice throughout the passage is that of a father figure pointing a younger leader toward what is coming. Brian asked the room to read and observe before he made any interpretive moves, and the congregation engaged directly, pulling out words like endure, myths, and sober-minded.

Brian focused the conversation on verses three and four, where Paul warns that a time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but will follow teachers who tell them what they want to hear. He noted that the Greek word for time in that verse is kairos rather than kronos, meaning a God-appointed moment already on his calendar rather than a point on a sequential timeline. He also spent time on the phrase sound teaching, explaining it carries the idea of something free from any mixture of error, and used the image of rat poison to make the point that something can be almost entirely true and still be deadly.

Brian was careful to hold the cultural observations in tension. When the conversation moved toward Christian nationalism and political solutions, he pushed back directly, saying that placing the hope of revival in a political system is a misguided path. He affirmed that biblical values matter in public life but argued that the vehicle of political activism is not where that renewal comes from. He also noted that churches which have learned obedience while it is relatively inexpensive will be the ones with the muscle memory to hold when the cost rises.

He closed by telling a specific story from Tribe's own history. During COVID, several people urged Brian to apply for relief funding available to nonprofits. After talking it through with the leadership team, they said no. It cost them some relationships and some credibility with other pastors in the valley. Within months of that decision, a gift of $250,000 came in toward securing the building the church now owns. Brian offered it not as a prosperity formula but as a concrete example of what he has been saying throughout the series: the leadership of Jesus was not complicated in that moment, but it was costly, and obedience trained in smaller moments prepares a community for larger ones.