What does Tribe teach about shame?
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 shame starts with a question about identity: whose name is written on you, and who put it there? Brian Hunter has spent two weeks in this territory, drawing from 1 John 3:1-3 and Ephesians 1:3-14 to argue that shame is not the final word on a person because God has already marked his own. The image Brian keeps returning to is a name sewn into the lining of a jacket, or written on the bottom of a boot: ownership that is deliberate and permanent, not worn on the outside to be seen, but written in a place that cannot be scratched out. The Father has lavished love on his children, the text says, and that is what they are, not what they feel on a given day.
Brian draws a direct line between shame and the enemy's strategy. The enemy works from the outside in, using confusion, lies, and intimidation to deface what God made. Brian used the image of graffiti sprayed over something carefully built, someone coming along to scratch out and spray over what a maker had originally created. Against that, God's mark is the Holy Spirit taking up residence inside a believer, described in Ephesians 1:13-14 as a seal and a guarantee. That seal is not undone by failure or rebellion. Brian says the Spirit engraves God's name on the heart permanently, which means shame's loudest claim, that you are too far gone or too broken to belong, is a lie about something that has already been settled.
The practical weight of this teaching is that shame often works by pressing a person into a shape that is not their own. Brian says, "Anybody or any person or any force that doesn't encourage you to be you very well could be a force of the enemy." He goes further: "You are God's unique poem. The stated goal of the enemy is to scribble and scratch that out." Where shame says you are unrecognizable, the teaching at Tribe says the Holy Spirit's work is to highlight and develop the particular way a person was made, not to produce a generic version of faith, but to express God's life through someone who is fully themselves.
Taught from 1 John 3:1-3 · Ephesians 1:3-14 · Isaiah 49:16 · Zephaniah 3:17 · John 16:8
“Anybody or any person or any force that doesn't encourage you to be you very well could be a force of the enemy.”
From Sealed and Branded
The passage taught · Ephesians 1:3-14
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ;
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without defect before him in love;
5 having predestined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his desire,
6 to the praise of the glory of his grace, by which he freely gave us favor in the Beloved,
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 28, 2025 Sealed and Branded Brian Hunter walks Tribe through Ephesians 1:13-14, exploring what it means to be sealed by the Holy Spirit and why that identity matters more than any label the world puts on you.
- July 21, 2025 What Great Love Brian Hunter asks a simple question: if someone looked at the sole of your heart's boot, whose name would they find written there?