CityTeam Ministries was started in 1957 by Lester and Pauline Myers as a feeding program for homeless men in downtown San Jose. Four years later, the ministry - then known as the San Jose Rescue Mission - moved to a larger facility where it began providing shelter as well as meals to street people.

Around that same time, May and Mac McLean were operating a boys ranch in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains and a summer camp in Lake Tahoe for boys from broken homes. In 1969, the McLeans asked the San Jose Rescue Mission to consider merging the two ministries, and soon the organization was reaching out to both the homeless and troubled youths.

San Jose Rescue Mission changed its name to CityTeam in 1983, a name which more accurately represented its expanding urban focus. Five years later, CityTeam started a similar program in Chester, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia.

In 1999, we added to our ministry family, West Coast Peniel Missions. Now, we are also in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Oakland.

Future Goals
For more than 42 years, CityTeam Ministries has been addressing the problems of homelessness, drug addiction, poverty and at-risk youths. These problems are common to almost any city in the world. That's why CityTeam is expanding into other cities and recently began forming partnerships with other ministries overseas.

But before we move into a city, we must:

• Have a sense of God's leading
• Gather support from the local church
• Have documented proof that there is an unmet need; and
• Ascertain a commitment from local people to meet that need

Our desire is to build up a team of committed leaders inside and outside the local church, training them and challenging them to respond to these needs in their own community. We want to serve in whatever way we can, acting as a catalyst, to help pool all available resources to meet the immediate and ongoing needs of the poor living there.