Mission and Vision
Our mission:
The mission of Avondale is to love and serve God and others through worship, learning, fellowship, and outreach. We believe strongly that these four dynamics of our life together enable us to be a place where all people can be experience the love and grace of God and participate in God’s mission in the world.
Our vision:
We envision a community of faith in which people are invited to connect deeply and intentionally with God, with each other, and with their neighbors.
The scriptures proclaim that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19), which means that one of the most urgent aspects of God’s mission, the thing that compelled God to send his own Son to suffer and die for us, is to restore his relationship with us—to reconnect with us. Therefore, one of the most important things we can do as a church is to ensure that in our ministries we are seeking to participate in what God is already up to in the world.
Even those of us who have been in church all of our lives will occasionally feel disconnected. This can actually be a good thing. It’s a kind of holy discontent when we realize that there could be more to our relationship with God. After all, this relationship is what we were made for and it’s what God longs for. The Bible says that our searching for a connection with God is the result of God’s insatiable desire to connect with us. John Ed Mathison captured that hunger when he said, “Psychologists tell us that most people in America are unsatisfied...Something deep within us is still crying out for the real deal...Nothing will feel right until we get it” (Treasures of the Transformed Life, p. 8).
St. Augustine once prayed, “O Lord, thou hast put salt on our tongues that we may be thirsty for Thee.” Our prayer as a congregation and for our community, in the spirit of Augustine, is that God will kindle within us a great hunger and thirst for deeper and stronger connections with one another and with the Lord through the vital practices of Christian discipleship.
