Garden City Church Turns 3 Years Old
Yesterday Garden City Church turned three years old! Three years ago a handful of us started this church with a dream to engage Silicon Valley with the good news of Jesus in a fresh way. You can click here for more of the story of how we got started. We are amazed and grateful over how God is building our church. The picture above shows part of our gathering yesterday.
In contrast, this is a picture of our first core group meeting. What you'll notice is a lot of empty seats. Starting a church is far from easy.
Our favorite thing to celebrate at Garden City is baptisms, when people go public with their faith in Jesus. Yesterday we celebrated a lot of baptisms--our most ever in a single day.
The baptisms included two dads who baptized their oldest kids. Here, Garden City elder, Matt Lyon, hugs his son George after baptizing him.
Garden City people like to have fun. Here some people from one of our Neighborhood Groups (the family rooms & front lines of our church) strike a pose at the photo booth we set up at yesterday's party.
One of our downtown San Jose Neighborhood Groups having some fun.
The fun included free food for everybody, good music, and face painting for the kids.
This is Barry. We love Barry. Barry is constantly encouraging people, praying for people, and cracking jokes.
My wife and I had the joy of baptizing Michele, our friend and our son's Kindergarten teacher. This is Michele's story. We showed this video yesterday and the congregation cheered and clapped at the end.
We have a lot of kids and babies in our church family. Right now the average might be that a new baby is born here every two or three weeks.
Yesterday's service included a powerful spoken word by our Family Pastor, Steve Patton, accompanied by the Garden City band playing, "Redeemed to Redeem." The church went crazy over this. We hope to have a full video later, for now click here to catch a few seconds of it.
This is the Garden City staff. I love, love, love the team we've assembled here. Each member of this team has a big heart for loving people and has unique leadership abilities that complement the team. It feels great to be part of a great team. From left to right: Chad (Intern), Colin (Worship Leader), Nick (Executive Pastor), Noemma (City Coordinator), Ronnie (Communication Coordinator), Steve (Family Pastor), and me.
Yesterday I preached an important message, Give Your Church To Your City. We're excited to grow as a church in both declaring and demonstrating the gospel of Jesus to our city.
Yesterday we passed out stickers with the Garden City logo. Our goal with these stickers is to stir up curiosity, for people ask about these stickers and to get a chance to tell people about Jesus and our church family. When you see one of these stickers around the city, post it on twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. with the hashtag #GardenCity.
My middle son put his sticker on his Kindergarten folder.
I love my church. I love this adventure we are on together. Thank you to those of you who have been praying for Garden City for three years now. Keep doing it. And, if you know of someone looking for a church in Silicon Valley, you can send them to other great churches in our city or you can send them our way. Send them to one of our Sunday gatherings, at 4pm or 5:30pm. We're excited to watch Jesus keep building our church and keep building all of his churches in the Bay Area.