Our Vision
Silicon Valley is filled with inspired change-makers who innovate, create, and make meaning on a global scale.
As a startup church for the nations, we (re)unite Silicon Valley with God’s design for flourishing—life on a scale infinitely more grand than we can imagine, and yet one in which we are also intimately known and loved.
Our Leaders
The West Valley Neighborhood Church co-planters, Caitlin & Joel Rhodes-Karahadian, both have experience serving church plants and working in start-ups. They met in Houston, where they had each moved to answer God’s call to two different churches. They moved to Cupertino in late 2023.
Caitlin is an ordained pastor who lived in Beijing for ten years, initially working as a journalist and then as the first hire at a greentech startup, before being promoted to its management team. While running ALPHAs and small group ministries, she was actively serving with two church plants and then helped to launch a new Spirit-led service.
After receiving her call into vocational ministry, she obtained her Masters of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and recently completed her Theology of Masters in Ministry, with a concentration in Preaching. Caitlin served as the Associate Pastor of Equipping & Sending at FPC Houston for four years. Her personal vision statement is to be sent by God to strategic places at the God-appointed time to release more of His Kingdom, serving as a catalyst for Christ-centered communities. Caitlin did not have a church background growing up, and first got curious about a relationship with Jesus after noticing in college that the kindest, gentlest, and most joyful people she knew were all Christians.
A native Californian, Joel is a classically-trained musician, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and songwriter. He has served four previous church plant teams in roles as diverse as worship leader and executive pastor, and has also worked for a tech startup. A voracious learner, Joel loves to talk about books and interesting ideas. He enjoys cooking and will bless many with his meals. He misses being in a band and is eager to find a good recording studio nearby. Joel grew up in a Christian family, but went his own way in college. After college, he got reconnected to church and faith, first through music and then through the Bible. Caitlin and Joel are thrilled to get to partner together in ministry and open in their home and their hearts to reach a new neighborhood with the love of Jesus.
Befriended by God, we bless our neighbors and transform our communities with the love of Christ
Our Partners
We believe that God designed community to be a gift for human flourishing. Like the interlocking root system of the redwoods, healthy interdependence makes us stronger. We are better together. While we have many individual partners, here we feature and honor some of our first organizational partners in our mission. We hope and expect over the months and years to come that we will continue to connect with more collaborators.
West Valley Presbyterian Church
Where strangers become friends, friends become family, and together we serve the community in Christ’s Name
WVPC is our primary supporter and partner. They have graciously incubated us on their campus at the corner of Bollinger & Miller, and given generously and prayerfully to this church plant. West Valley Neighborhood Church wouldn’t exist without West Valley Presbyterian Church!
Bluewater is a presbytery of A Covenanted Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO). Their purpose is to support, encourage, and be a resource for local congregations. They cultivate connection and community among member churches in the California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, and Sonoma, as well as the state of Hawaii. Bluewater is one of 22 presbyteries in ECO.
About half of the initial funding for West Valley Neighborhood Church came from churches in our presbytery.
Bluewater Presbytery
Oak Grove Christian Ministries (OGCM) supports small and emerging Christ-centered non-profits in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping them flourish both now and in the future by providing high fiduciary accountability and financial management, as well as serving as a non-profit structure for each supported organization to grow into a self-supporting non-profit. By providing the statutory and administrative disciplines, OGCM enables nascent non-profits to focus their energy and attention on achieving their missions.
OGCM’s partnership allows West Valley Neighborhood Church to nest under their 501(c)3, and thereby receive tax-deductible contributions.
Oak Grove Christian Ministries
ECO
As ECO began, their desire was not simply to create another denomination, but to truly be a movement that recaptures the best of our Presbyterian and Reformed heritage to saturate our broken and hurting world with the transforming power of Jesus Christ.
In doing so, they see hundreds of thousands of movement-equipped people emerging for daily gospel influence. Like a child who blows a dandelion into the wind, the Spirit scatters us into our communities to plant the gospel. Imagine worldwide, millions of people linked to the surprising goodness of God, loved through tangible acts of kindness, lifted by the compelling good news of Jesus, and lavishly adopted into a new and better kind of family.
Pastor Caitlin is an ECO-ordained pastor, and when West Valley Neighborhood Church particularizes, we will be an ECO church (right now, we’re an ECO church plant). We believe in, submit to, and affirm ECO’s Essential Tenets.
West Valley Community Services (WVCS)
The mission of West Valley Community Services (WVCS) is to unite the community to fight hunger and homelessness; their vision is a community where every person has food on the table and every person has a roof over their head.
The work of WVCS is fueled by six core values: compassion, dignity, integrity, service, diversity, and ingenuity.
West Valley Community Services is fighting poverty by providing critical food, housing assistance, and support services to the low income and homeless individuals and families in the West Valley communities of Cupertino, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Saratoga, and West San Jose.
West Valley Neighborhood Church supports WVCS through monthly service projects, whether that be sorting donations or cleaning the food pantry. We also have an ongoing canned food drive (namely collected through our Open Air Open Mics) for WVCS. We love what they do and how they do it, and it’s a privilege to support their good work in whatever ways we can!
Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech (FWT)
The mission of the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech (FWT) is cultivating faith and work integration in the Bay Area to transform people who are transforming the world. FWT wants to raise up more integrated disciples in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Integrated discipleship is the deep, formative process of reuniting the sacred and secular divide between faith and work, resulting in a life in which Christians maintain a consistent identity in all areas of their lives, embody a compelling gospel witness wherever they go, and participate in God’s renewal of culture, especially through their work.
Integrated discipleship is holistic. It includes our heads (knowledge), our hearts (desires) and our hands (practice), and involves helping people know why and how their work matters to God, feel the deepest longings of their hearts connected in and to Christ, and practice Kingdom principles together in community.
Integrated discipleship results in transformation. If we transform the individuals and leaders who influence culture in the Bay Area, we can impact millions of lives throughout the world – both directly through exposure to transformed individuals and businesses, and indirectly through products and services that have been influenced for the better by Kingdom culture.
Pastor Caitlin is on the Advisory Council for FWT, and participates in a pastoral cohort to help shape the content for FWT’s flagship deep-dive discipleship, the Missional Vocational Pathway (MVP). West Valley Neighborhood Church is excited to partner with FWT and we look forward to having critical mass to run our own MVP cohort.
Whether through prayer, community service and events, or financial contributions, we welcome your partnership—whatever form it might take. We enjoy creative collaboration, and we bet we’d really like partnering with you! Let’s brainstorm how we can join together on God’s mission in West Valley.