History

          Though his first job after finishing college was being a school teacher in a suburban Christian School in 1982, he kept his eyes open for opportunities to get involved with kids in the inner city. His first opportunity came when he returned to the church he was raised in as a child which needed help with youth workers. He was very active with them for about 3 years from 1983-1984. Later he got involved with some of the students he was teaching and began to lead teams of teens into the inner city to do a Kids Bible club. He fell in love with the inner city work so after two years of working with them, he felt led by God to leave teaching and pursue some type of full time ministry that would allow him to spend more time with them. In 1987 he joined YFC and began directing programs for children and youth in the Highland Park area. He started with about 50 kids K-12 per week to over 120 kids per week by 1990. He also bought an old run down house in the community for $3300 and through many work teams from Highland Park Baptist Church it became a great and comfortable place to live and do ministry.
          Jacky and John met through a mutual friend who moved to San Jose. Jacky came to HP to join John in ministry in the summer of 1990 and by December they were married. She joined John in the same house in which he was living. They now have 4 children. One thing that really helped them feel better about raising their family in this run down community was the fact that through many generous donors and ambitious work teams able to buy up 4 other houses on the same block where they lived. One they turned into an office and meeting center and the other 3 they made available to Christian families, 2 who were from the community already. Now, many years later they have witnessed a tremendous turnaround in the community. Whereas on the block where they have rehabilitated these homes and placed Christian families in them there are now nice homes and yards and a community working together to keep up the safety of their block, on the next block over, there is great devastation — with burned out and abandoned buildings and a fair amount of criminal activity.
          By 1995 they were reaching over 100 children per week and had developed a year around program consisting of 9 months of weekly bible club sprinkled with an occasional weekend retreat or field trip, 6 weeks of summer day camp (where students received tutoring, recreation, and field trips for free), a 1 week overnight summer camp, a youth leadership program, a youth work experience program, sports teams, and even 1 overseas missions trips. From 1995 until 2001 the Weidman’s took a break from youth ministry to concentrate on programs for the parents and kids who had grown up to be too old for the youth programs. Their efforts to hand over the youth and children’s work to other leaders was not successful, however, and so they returned to revive these programs. Starting with 20 kids K-5 in the Fall of 2001 the programs grew to 60-80 kids per week and have restarting almost all of the programs that they had developed years ago.
          In the past few years it has been our emphasis to have kids in small groups where they can form relationships with their leaders and mentors. Over the years we have seen far more progress in these small groups than in large groups. Thus we have scaled back to serving 30-40 children per week.