About Us

Silicon Valley is both an amazing and challenging place to live and work. Garden City exists to be a growing counterculture to the pressure, loneliness, and consumerism of this place. We invite you to join us. You will find good news to enjoy, a community to belong to, and a mission—a deep sense of purpose—to live.

We named our church Garden City because the human story started in a garden (Gen.1) and adventures towards a garden city (Rev.22), plus we’re placed in a strategic region that the first settlers called “The Garden City” because everything they planted flourished in our valley’s fertile soil and temperate climate. We’re here to advance this story of flourishing, to impact a place that’s impacting the world.

We don’t don’t do this by “going to church” on Sundays, but by being the church every day of the week. All week we “Go & Make”—together we walk with Jesus, make disciples, and do work that makes an impact. You can play an important role in our church and in our city, and we’re excited to meet you!

In 2011, Justin and Taylor Buzzard and their three young sons moved to Silicon Valley with a dream. The God-sized dream was to start a new church that would engage the people of Silicon Valley with the gospel in a new and profound way. The day they moved they had only three people committed to the church plant and just $3,000 in the church bank account. It was a move of faith, banking on Jesus’ words “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).

Garden City Church launched on September 18th, 2011. The church grew through the compelling power of the gospel, our contagious community, and living on mission to make disciples. In addition to multiplying disciples, Garden City multiplies churches. In August 2020, Garden City sent out 50 members, a staff pastor, and funds to plant Quicksilver Church.

Jesus is on the move in and through Garden City. We invite you to join us and contribute to the next chapter of Garden City’s story.

Gospel

ADVENTURE WITH JESUS

Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, whatever you’re going through—Jesus pursues you with good news and calls you into a new adventure with him.

The gospel is the good news that we can enjoy a relationship with God and bring renewal to the world through the work, record, and performance of Jesus, rather than through our own performance––Jesus lived a perfect life for us, died for our sins, and rose again on our behalf. The gospel is how we both get in and grow in the Christian life. This message changes us from the inside out, transforming our hearts and our behavior. The gospel frees us to continually discover and say, “I am more broken and sinful than I ever dared believe, but in Jesus I am more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope.” This provides a radically new orientation to life and work for the people of Silicon Valley. The gospel of grace frees us from the idols that enslave us—frees us to live for God’s glory, not our own. What every human wants is to be both known and loved. The gospel announces that because of Jesus, we can have this: we can be known and loved by God. Jesus changes everything. Jesus gives his disciples a new identity, a new record, a new power, and a new future. The gospel is the driving center of everything we are and everything we do as a church. We not only proclaim the gospel, we aim to create a gospel culture at Garden City.

We are a church anchored in the gospel and excited about taking next steps with Jesus.  

Community

BRING PEOPLE WITH YOU

Life is impossible without friends. Our relational God created you for community. We are a church to belong to and bring to—Monday through Sunday we create community and make disciples by by bringing people with us as we go about our lives in our city.

Through the gospel we gain a new, true human community of deep and diverse friendships with brothers and sisters in Christ who come from all walks of life. The church is not a meeting you attend, it is a network of relationships you belong to—a big family that’s built upon grace and is busy pursuing Jesus’ mission together. As we do life together as members of a community, knowing and loving one another, our city will notice. “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). We gather and scatter in our city no longer living for ourselves, but as connected and committed members of a family/body. In community, Jesus changes us and uses us. He shrinks our pride and surfaces our gifts. We come to see that all people stand on equal ground at the foot of the cross, giving us a freeing humility that welcomes the messy and glorious work of being a family and finding our unique place in the family.

As a community of men and women, we are all equal, but not the same. The church community is modeled off of the nuclear family, where both men and women ambitiously lead and contribute, yet with distinct roles that complement one another. Both men and women are equal and lead in our family, yet in a way that honors the distinctive leadership role God has given qualified men as the head of their homes and as pastors/elders. Our model is our Triune God—Father, Son, and Spirit—who have eternally enjoyed loving, servant-hearted community, yet with each member of the Trinity exercising different roles.

We are a church to belong to and bring to.

Vocation

CARRY OUT YOUR CALLING

God placed you in Silicon Valley with a vocation, a calling to use your unique life to do work that impacts our city…and eternity. We are a church of diverse men and women exploring how to best use our particular stories and strengths to make a life-giving impact.

We are a church of missionaries where every member is on mission to delight in, declare, and demonstrate the gospel to our city, yet in diverse ways that are true to who we are as unique image bearers of God. Disciple-making isn’t something we add to our lives, it’s something we weave through all that we do as part of the diverse ways we’re each called to know and love our city. God wants us to thrive in our vocations, to use our unique design and calling to reveal God to the world and to help others flourish and discover more of who they are as image bearers of God. As we each carry out our callings with excellence, thoughtfulness, and prayer in the homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces where God has placed us, we advance not only our careers, but also the mission of God.

We do our most fruitful mission work by living out our ordinary lives with gospel intentionality, not through attending a busy schedule of religious activities. As we each explore who we are and the unique work God has called us to do, we will be a church that makes Silicon Valley a better city. As one writer puts it, “The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world needs most to have done…The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking.)

We are a church of diverse men and women exploring how to best use our particular stories and strengths to make a life-giving impact.

Making Disciples Who Impact Our City for Jesus

These eight words are what Garden City Church is all about. To join Garden City you’re not joining a static entity, you’re joining a dynamic mission. Jumping into the life of our church means committing to proactively advance our mission to go & make disciples. These eight words (which are our way of stating Jesus’ mission for his church: the Great Commission of Matthew 28:16-20) guide and shape everything we are and everything we do as Garden City Church.