Central Abbotsford

Those of you who have been around Northview for any length of time will know that each weekend, one (or more) of our preaching pastors delivers a sermon based on a Biblical text. Perhaps you have wondered how it is our team goes about determining which passage to open on any given Saturday (or Sunday). Allow me to give you some insight into the process.

Currently, the primary responsibility for setting our preaching calendar rests with our lead pastor, Mark Burch, and our teaching and weekend ministry pastor, Joshua Scott. Every so often, they gather together to seek the input from the other members of our preaching team regarding where we, as pastors in the local church, understand the people of Northview to be at, and, with prayer and seeking the Spirit, where we understand God is leading us in terms of the counsel of His word for this church.

Our shared conviction as a preaching team is that the majority of weekend messages should consist of expository preaching (meaning that we explain, illustrate, and apply the text of Scripture) going through entire books of the Bible (in order to best understand and appreciate the full counsel of a particular book). Accordingly, most of our weekends follow this model.

As with the sermon series that we are currently working through (the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians), we sometimes pause the series with the intention of picking it up in the future. This is why we spent the past couple of months working through the text unit of the twelfth through fourteenth chapters of 1 Corinthians – they form something of a subsection of the letter addressing the topic of spiritual gifts. Our intention is to preach the final two chapters of the letter in the New Year.

There are times when our preaching team is led to work through a specific topic found in the Bible. Because we have just been working through spiritual gifts as Paul applies them in Corinth, starting in the second weekend of November, we are going to take a few weeks looking at how the New Testament looks at the same issue in some other contexts.

Additionally, there are some specific rhythms to the church calendar that we generally follow annually – the four weeks preceding Christmas almost always consist of an Advent series, as we look through the Biblical texts that speak to Jesus’ first coming and anticipate His return (and we will be preaching through such a series again this year). And, once again, the specific texts that we select to preach from in these series are very much a team effort from our pastors.

All this to say that there are, every once in a while, little gaps in our preaching schedule where a rogue week slips through the cracks between two series and affords the preacher a choice of which text to preach out of. This weekend at Central Abby happens to be one of those instances. I have been given some guidance (since it is Global Missions Focus weekend at our Downes Road Campus, there is to be something of a missional emphasis in my text – think the “Go” of “Gather, Grow, Go”). And so, this weekend, I will be preaching from the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah.

You might wonder why I’ve chosen this passage – you’ll have to wait until Saturday to find out! But I’m sharing the text with you in advance because, since it is something of a one-off sermon, I wanted you to have the opportunity to prepare and read through the text in advance, if you like. In fact, if you have the time, I would encourage you to read through the first six chapters of the book to see what God is saying to His people before we get to our text for this weekend. I think it will give you some useful context for why Isaiah responds the way that he does to God’s call in our text.

So, I hope you get the chance to read it, but whether or not you do, I hope to see you this Saturday!

In Christ,

Eric