Lakeside Community Presbyterian: Christ, connection and community

Lakeside Community Presbyterian Church

• Contact: 9908 Channel Road, Lakeside 619-443-1021 www.lakesidepc.org
• Membership: 114
• Pastor: Timothy Avazian
• Age: 62
• Born: Kingsburg
• Formation: Azusa Pacific University; Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena
• Years Ordained: 27

San Diego Reader: What is your favorite subject on which to preach?

Pastor Timothy Avazian: How to love Jesus. We can teach people how to love Christ and other people. Ultimately, how to love Christ means how to be a disciple. Love God and love people. It’s that simple. It’s the call that Jesus gives all his disciples. We’re supposed to go and make disciples. To me, in thinking about making a disciple, it’s really introducing people to Jesus Christ, and helping them to love him more and more.

SDR: What’s your main concern as a member of the clergy?

PA: People are often disappointed in the church, which means they get disappointed in God. So they put God and his ways on the back burner because they’ve been disappointed in the past or in their parents or something. In relation to doing the work we do in churches, we’re trying to point people to God, because we’re giving hope for the future. Even though we’ve been disappointed in the past, there’s hope for the future. Hopefully, my sermons point to a loving, caring and generous God who is looking out for us. It also happens in the midst of connecting with people, and letting them see how God is real in my life. Hopefully, that carries over in how that happens in the lives of the people in the congregation as well, who may be able to share in a simple way that love for God.

SDR: Why Presbyterian?

PA: In the midst of my seminary training, I decided I was going to go the Presbyterian route. I like the combination of scripture and community. Presbyterians like to say they're good students of God’s word but there’s also a connectional aspect – the different Presbyterian churches are connected to one another. That appealed to me.

SDR: What is the mission of your church?

PA: We’re called to help people in the context of community – to know Christ and to become his disciples. We’re called to Christ, connection and community. Our church hasn’t officially said that, because I’m trying to do some new things and we’re working our way through a new vision.

SDR: Where do you go when you die?

PA: In some miraculous way there is this bodily resurrection of my soul, where I get to be in heaven in the presence of God. I am looking forward to that – I don’t know what that is exactly, except what we read in scriptures. It’s this place that is another world, in heaven. But somehow I am looking forward to it in the sense that I get to be reunited with others that have gone on before me, such as family and friends – and other saints. Being in the presence of God is the thing I’m most looking forward to – to be in his presence forever. There is some type of separation between those who love God and those who don’t. I not the judge of it, but I can only point it out to people and let God be the judge. Scripture talks about some type of separation, however. I don’t know what the parameters for that are, but I preach the criteria for heaven. God ultimately is the judge. But that’s hell – separation from being in the presence of God.