What does Tribe teach about church confession?
Drawn from the message 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 church confession comes out of the final week of the 'Turn the Cat Around' series, where Brian opened the floor for the congregation to share how the series had challenged and changed them. What emerged was not a tidy report but a live demonstration of what communal honesty can do in a body of people. Colleen shared that a public act of repentance she made early in the series 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 frame these as success stories. He treated them as evidence that individual obedience has a ripple effect in the whole church.
The anchor for that conversation was 2 Timothy 4:1-5, where Paul writes to Timothy as a father figure warning a younger leader about what is coming. Brian pressed the congregation to look hard at 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. The word for time in that verse, Brian noted, is the Greek kairos rather than kronos, pointing to a God-appointed moment rather than the ordinary tick of a clock. That framing puts the call to honest confession and sound teaching in an urgent register, not a routine one.
Running underneath all of it was a single statement Brian said the Holy Spirit had placed on his heart throughout the series: "The leadership of Jesus will be less complicated but more costly." That cost showed up concretely in the room, in people willing to speak honestly about what had broken in them and what had changed. Lissa offered a picture of a braid with a wrong thread woven into it as an image of wounds and shame that need to be unbraided before the Lord can rewrite a story. Brian's invitation was not to manufacture confession but to trust that honest, costly obedience in one person creates space for others to follow.
Taught from 2 Timothy 4:1-5 · 2 Timothy 4:7 · Ezekiel 18:31 · Ezekiel 18:23
“I don't want you to die, says the Sovereign Lord. Turn back and live.”
From TTCA Week 9 Wrap Up
The passage taught · 2 Timothy 4:1-5
1 I command you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his Kingdom:
2 preach the word; be urgent in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with all patience and teaching.
3 For the time will come when they will not listen to the sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, will heap up for themselves teachers after their own lusts;
4 and will turn away their ears from the truth, and turn away to fables.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- May 1, 2023 TTCA Week 9 Wrap Up Brian Hunter wraps up the "Turn the Cat Around" series, exploring what it costs to follow Jesus faithfully as culture drifts further from biblical truth.