Myrtle Amelia hall was born on 3 April 1905 in Colchester North, Essex County, Ontario. After graduating from normal school, she taught high school in Comber and Dorchester. In 1928, she met Jean Funé in Quebec City, where he was pastoring. He left to serve as a missionary to Vietnam that same year, and they began corresponding. Meanwhile, Myrtle enrolled at the Missionary Training Institute in Nyack, NY, to prepare for missionary service. She and Jean were married in 1935, after which she joined him in Vietnam.

Rev. 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. Jean 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 to 1925, 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 and Myrtle 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 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. Myrtle died in Regina, Saskatchewan on 1 February 1992. Jean passed away on 5 January 2000 at his home in Hamilton, Ontario.

Rev. 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 a Canadian, Myrtle Hall (b. 3 April 1905, d. 1 February 1992) 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 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.

Marion Hull was born in December 1901 in New Westminster, British Columbia. She was actively involved in the church from a young age and later moved with her family to Edmonton. She played for the Edmonton Commercial Graduates (known as “The Grads”) women’s basketball team for one year while in high school. She worked as a secretary in Edmonton and then enrolled at Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta in the early 1930s.

Marguerite Railton was born in Smithville, Ontario in 1904 to a family of five children. She also came from a Christian background. After completing high school, she took teacher’s training at Toronto Normal School in 1922-1923. After two years of teaching in a three-roomed schoolhouse in rural Ontario, she decided to return to school, and completed one year of nurse’s training. She later moved to Edmonton, where her sister Mabel and brother-in-law Gordon Skitch were ministering, and she became actively involved in their church. She later enrolled in the Prairie Bible Institute, where she became Marion Hull’s roommate.

Marion and Marguerite became good friends at Prairie Bible Institute and both felt a call to the ministry during their final year. The district superintendent from the Christian and Missionary Alliance did not wish to send them out to rural areas on their own; however, once it was agreed that they would go together, their “selfless service” began. Over 36 years, they served in five rural communities: Denzil, Saskatchewan (1935-1941); Hythe, Alberta (1941-1949); Daysland, Alberta (1950-1960); Lamont, Alberta (1960-1967); and Mirror, Alberta (1967-1971). Although the Christian and Missionary Alliance did not ordain them, they were regarded as pastors/evangelists, and they actively led Sunday church services and prayer meetings. They also did home visitations and participated in Bible camps and other recruitment activities. They were well-liked in their communities, highly regarded by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and very successful in nurturing the growth and development of the Alliance churches in the various areas in which they served.

After retiring from Mirror in 1971, Marion and Marguerite moved to Red Deer, Alberta, where they were active members of the Red Deer Alliance Church for 20 years. They moved to Calgary, Alberta in 1991 because of health concerns and to be closer to family. Marion passed away in 1994, and Marguerite passed away in 1998.

Evelyn Ruth Wiens served as a missionary for the International Church of the Nazarene in South Africa (1970-1981) and Papua New Guinea (1987-1994). She was born November 12th 1943 and died on September 11th 1998. She received a Bachelor of Theology degree from Canadian Nazarene College in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1965 and went on to graduate from the Royal Alexandra Hospital School of Nursing in 1968 with an R.N. degree.
Before beginning her missionary work Wiens worked as a nurse in Alberta with a First Nations community from 1968-1970, in order to fulfill requirements for the grant that covered her training expenses. After finishing that work, she applied to the World Mission Division of the Church of the Nazarene to work as a missionary nurse and was appointed to a position in Acornhoek, E. Transvaal, in the Republic of South Africa. She served in South Africa from 1970 until September of 1981, when mental health issues resulted in a doctor and the mission board recommending that she take a medical leave of absence. She returned home to Canada, where she stayed with her family. In 1982, after several episodes of distorted thinking and actions, she requested to be hospitalized.
In 1987, confident that God had healed her schizophrenia, Wiens reapplied to the Board of World Missions to be reappointed as a missionary nurse. After some deliberation, the board decided that the severity of her previous breakdown was due to extenuating circumstances and that she was healthy enough to serve again. She was appointed to a position in Papua New Guinea, where she helped to train nurses and establish a community based health care program. She served there until 1994, when she suffered a major seizure, which resulted in significant brain damage.
After hospitalization she was sent home to Canada, where she was placed in a rehabilitation program for brain damage in the Chedoke-McMaster Hospital in Hamilton. She was honored with a Distinguished Service award from Oakville Church of the Nazarene in 1996 for her work in missions. She passed away on September 11th 1998 of a brain seizure caused by her pre-existing brain damage.

Dr. John Staples Sawin was born in 1915 in Wakefield, Mass. Sawin graduated from the Missionary Training Institute (now Nyack College) in 1935. He went on to study at Gordon-Conwell College (formerly Gordon College) where he graduated from in 1938, the same year he married Woneta Forest. John Sawin proceeded to pastor churches in Marblehead, Mass., Muncie, Ind., and Cleveland, Ohio during which time he did graduate studies and earned his master of divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He began pastoring Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in 1942. In 1947, John and Woneta left for Vietnam, where they would spend the next 15 years as Alliance missionaries. John Sawin’s responsibilities in Vietnam included active participation in evangelism, church planting, pastoral training, seminary teaching, music, radio and literature. John Sawin also served as pastor of the International Church in Saigon and as an auxiliary chaplain to U.S. service personnel in Southeast Asia. Upon returning to the United States in 1962, Sawin served as professor of Bible and missions at Simpson Bible College in San Francisco (now Simpson College, Redding, Calif.). The Sawins went on from there to lead churches in Washington, D.C., Lombard, Ill., and San Jose, Calif. In 1976, Sawin began a six-year commitment to organize the A. B. Simpson Historical Library and Archives in Nyack, N.Y. He also co-authored All for Jesus: God at Work in the Christian and Missionary Alliance over One Hundred Years (1986), and compiled an extensive collection of the C&MA’s work in Vietnam from 1911 to 1975. From 1983 to 1992, John consulted with Canadian Bible College and Canadian Theological Seminary (CBC/CTS, now Ambrose University College and Canadian Theological Seminary in Calgary, Alta.) to lay the groundwork for the archive collection there. He donated his library and research work to the CBC/CTS archives. For his outstanding service for Christ in the ranks of the C&MA, and his generous and laborious efforts to preserve the history of the C&MA, John Sawin was honored with a doctor of divinity from CTS. He passed away on November 25, 2003.

Ruth Patterson was born in 1924 just outside of Toronto, Ontario. She took her post high school training at Toronto Bible College, Windsor School of Nursing and Nyack Missionary College. Ministry and missionary service were no strangers to her as she was brought up in a home with parents dedicated to serving the Lord. So it was no surprise when she headed off to her first missionary assignment in Zaire where she served for four terms from 1952-1972. She assumed nursing and administrative duties at the Kinkonzi Hospital and also gave direction and taught at the nursing school.

In 1973 Ruth responded to a call for nurses in Cambodia that was issued by World Vision and ministered in Phnom Penh and in refugee camps. In 1975 when Cambodia fell, she relocated to Thailand teaching English and English Bible at Bangkok Bible College. She continued to assist Cambodian refugees with transitioning from camps to other countries. France was next on her journey. Moving to Paris in 1978 she worked with the Boulogne Cambodian Church outreach to Cambodian refugees and then moved to Pau in 1983 to work with French, Asian and Angolan refugees. Her final term from 1986-1991 was spent helping to plant a church in Martiques and also working in church planting among Cambodians in Marseille.

After forty years of service, Ruth retired to Ontario, Canada where she continued to minister in missionary meetings, Bible studies, prayer lines, and chapel services at a nursing home.

The fonds are from the experiences of Ruth over 40 years. Missionary letters and prayer requests highlight the activities she was challenged and blessed with on this journey. Numerous personal letters from family, friends, colleagues and those she so capably ministered too in spiritual and practical ways through her nursing skills, theological knowledge and servants heart, bring to life a missionary’s life.

Reg Reimer was born in 1940 on Vancouver Island, B. C. When he was four, his family moved to the Chilliwack area, where they began attending the German-speaking Mennonite Brethren church in which Reg was later baptized. After graduating from high school, he moved to Omaha, Nebraska, to attend Grace Bible Institute (GBI). During his second year, he met LaDonna (Donna) Rose Goodwin from Hutchinson, Kansas. They married in the summer of 1961. Reg and Donna have two children: Jay Reimer, born in October 1964, and Jill (Kila) Reimer, born in May 1966.

Reg was expelled from GBI for defending the supposedly deviant theological views of one of his professors. On the advice of this same professor, he decided to pursue further studies at the University of Nebraska. He graduated in 1964 with a B.A. English Literature and a certificate in secondary education.

Reg and Donna were called to missions at the Omaha Gospel Tabernacle, a flagship church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). As one of the conditions of their appointment as missionaries both pursued further studies in Nyack, N.Y. – Reg at the Jaffray School of Mission and Donna at Nyack Missionary College. In 1966 they received an assignment to Vietnam.

The Reimers served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1975. Their first assignment after language study was to the coastal town of Phan Thiet, from which they were evacuated almost immediately during the Tet Offensive of 1968. In 1970 Reg took a leave to attend Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission, where he earned his master’s degree.

During the fall of Vietnam, Reg was sent to Guam to assist the United States military in caring for the thousands of Vietnamese evacuees who had been sent to the island in anticipation of being relocated. His job was to oversee missionaries who were serving as translators and trouble-shooters. For this he received high commendation from a US Navy admiral.

In 1975, Reg spent a year as the missionary-in-residence at Canadian Bible College and Canadian Theological Seminary in Regina, Saskatchewan. Since 1980, he has made frequent visits to Vietnam, during which he has kept careful record of religious freedom abuses against Protestants. He also served as the representative for Vietnam at the 1974, 1989, 2010 Lausanne Congresses. Since 2009, Reg has returned to Vietnam yearly to give lectures on Protestantism in Vietnamese to government religion and security officials.

In 1976, Reg and Donna were sent to serve as missionaries in Thailand. Reg became the Director of CAMA Services, which did relief and development work among Indochinese refugees. Until 1983 he also served as the director of World Relief US’s work in Southeast Asia, as well as chairing a committee composed of NGO’s, UN agencies, and representatives of the Thai government. During the Cambodian refugee crisis of 1979-1980 he helped lead a relief effort that provided Cambodian peasants with seed and agricultural implements, thereby decreasing their dependence on aid from the West. At the same time he worked with the Mennonite Central Committee and World Relief US to resettle Vietnamese refugees in in Canada and the United States. For his humanitarian work Reg was awarded the Order of the White Elephant medal by the king of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej (r. 1946-2016).

In 1983, the Reimers moved to Toronto, so that Reg could become the first president of World Relief Canada (WRC), the relief arm of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. He was seconded to serve as the senior staff member of the World Evangelical Alliance; in this capacity he worked to facilitate reconciliation and healing in Rwanda and Indochina.

In 1997, Reg helped organize the Strategic Vietnam Partnership (SVP) an informal organization dedicated to helping mission agencies in Vietnam coordinate their efforts. In 1998, he joined Interdev (later International Partnering Associates) as the coordinator for mainland Southeast Asia. Reg is now the senior mentor for SVP, and he also serves on the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s Religious Liberty Commission. In 2000, he was invited to brief President Bill Clinton on the eve of Clinton’s historic visit to Vietnam.

Reg is the author of Vietnam’s Christians: A Century of Growth and Diversity (Littleton: William Carey Library, 2011) and also co-authored and co-edited Sorrow and Blood: Christian Mission in Contexts of Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom (Littleton: William Carey Library, 2012).

This biographical description is a condensation of an autobiography that can be found here https://globalvault.ca/5-biography-2/

Mabel Dimock Oldfield (1878-1965) and her husband Walter H. Oldfield (1879-1958) served as missionaries to Guangxi, China during the first half of the twentieth century.

Walter Oldfield and his wife Mabel Dimock Oldfield (1878-1965) served as missionaries to Guangxi, China during the first half of the twentieth century.

Robert Henry was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on 28 June 1933. He is a graduate of St. Paul Bible College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he met his wife, Svea. In 1956 they commenced their missionary service in Viet Nam under the Christian and Missionary Alliance. They were blessed with three daughters. The eldest, Karen Lynne (now deceased), was born 15 months before they set sail from New York for their first term. Daughters Lynda Lee and Virginia Jewel, a Down's Syndrome child (now deceased), were both born in Dalat, Viet Nam. An informally adopted fourth daughter, Kien, a Chinese refugee from the tragic "killing fields" experience in Cambodia, was taken into their family in 1980.
Due to Virginia's special needs, the Henrys returned to North America where, for a short period, in order to support his family, Henry became a scientific linguist with the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State where he taught the Vietnamese language. Later he served as a language consultant to the Institute for Behavioural Research, then situated in Silver Springs, Maryland, where he engaged in the development of a new approach to language study. In 1963, Henry began pastoring the C&MA church in Washington, D.C. The Henrys returned to Dalat in 1966 after finding suitable care for Virginia in Ontario. While there, Henry founded and directed the Vietnamese Language School and began work on a six volume textbook series on the Vietnamese language, which was later published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
In 1968 the Henrys, along with over 30 missionary colleagues and their children, barely escaped with their lives in the infamous Tet Offensive. Most of their colleagues at Banmethuot, a nearby mission station, were either killed or kidnapped. Meanwhile, in Dalat, the Henrys and their language students, together with their small children, escaped Viet Cong encirclement only seconds before Viet Cong troops stormed into the buildings where they had been hiding.
At the end of that year the Henrys were appointed to Sydney, Australia, where Henry founded and directed the work of The Christian and Missionary Alliance of Australia. While there he became a regularly invited speaker at several of the Australian Keswick conventions. After more than nine years of leadership in the Australian C&MA, and after a short stint as a national conference speaker and evangelist for the C&MA in North America, he was called to be the preaching pastor of Sevenoaks Alliance Church in Abbotsford, British Columbia. This rewarding but short appointment was interrupted in 1979, when he was elected Vice President/Church Ministries of the C&MA, which was then headquartered in Nyack, New York. In 1984 he and his family relocated to Vancouver, B.C. where he had taken a position as pastor of Tenth Avenue Alliance Church. The family then moved to England, where Henry assisted in the reorganization of the British Missionary Alliance. He also took a sabbatical at Regent's Park College, Oxford, where he conducted research on notable British preachers of the Victorian era that was later published as The Golden Age of Preaching: Men Who Moved the Masses, which was published in 2006.
Following this, he directed the work of World Relief Hong Kong among the Vietnamese boat people. In this capacity he regularly spent time in Viet Nam itself directing a program of relief and development on behalf of World Relief Corporation, U.S.A. He later became President of World Relief Canada. He eventually resigned from this position to spend a year preaching in colleges and universities on behalf of English Language Institute China in an effort to recruit Christian English teachers to teach in universities in China, Mongolia, Laos, Tibet, and Viet Nam. Now retired, the Henrys reside in Toronto, where Dr. Henry continues to preach, write, and consult.