Funé, Jean

Funé, Jean

Reverend Jean Émile Roger Funé (1902-2000) served as a missionary and pastor in the Christian & Missionary Alliance (C&MA) for nearly 50 years. He was born on 18 May 1902, in Ville Favard, France to Eugène & Rachel (Gargot) Funé, and died on 5 January 2000 at his home in Hamilton, Ontario. Funé spent 42 years in Vietnam and Cambodia as a C&MA missionary and five years in Quebec as a missionary and pastor before retiring in 1975. From 1922 to1925, Jean Funé attended the Nogent Bible School in France. While at Nogent, he received a call to become a missionary to French Indochina. With this in mind, he enrolled at Nyack (N.Y.) Missionary College in 1925. He graduated in 1927 and began his service in Vietnam the following year. Funé used his French citizenship to good advantage. For example, he was instrumental in purchasing land at Dalat, on which the C&MA later built a school for missionaries' children, and several other strategic properties elsewhere in the country. Jean married Myrtle Hall in 1935, and together they had two children, George Eugène (b. 25 March 1938) and Esther Marie (b. 30 September 1942). In 1944, the Funés and their children were taken to Hanoi and then Xieng-Khouang, Laos, where they were interned for eight months by the Vichy Government in 1944. In 1966, the elder Funés left an increasingly dangerous Vietnam for Cambodia, where they served until 1970, when they began their retirement in Canada. Their retirement was short-lived, as Jean became both the coordinator of C&MA work in Quebec and the pastor of Belvedere Church in Quebec City for five years. In 1975, the Funés moved to Regina, where they worked with Vietnamese refugees.

Ambrose University College