Salvation Army: Jacques Donzé, new president of the France and Belgium Foundation
Jacques Donzé has already assumed the management of the association in several European countries. He succeeds Daniel Naud, who is retiring after eight years as President of the Salvation Army Foundation (AdS) in France and Belgium. His wife, also a colonel, Claude-Evelyne, who has also been involved for a long time, has been appointed territorial president of Women’s Ministries and Family for the two countries, informs a press release from the Foundation on June 28. The AdS is in fact made up of a Protestant Congregation and the Foundation, its lever for social and humanitarian action. Born in Lausanne, the 58-year-old colonel grew up in the middle.
He became pastor (officer) of the AdS in 1990. Subsequently, Jacques Donzé continued pastoral and social outreach work in Switzerland and Belgium, before becoming a youth leader. Without further detailing a CV further enriched in Austria and Hungary, in February 2020, the colonel was appointed head of the Salvation Army in Italy and Greece, in the midst of the covid crisis. And last May, he became with his wife head of the Congregation in France and Belgium.
“By obedience”
Both received the call early on to join the ranks. “At 17, I wanted to be a sports teacher. But it was at this age that God called me to serve him as an officer of the AdS”, Jacques Donzé book in May in an interview. Despite resistance at first, he said yes “more out of obedience than out of a heartfelt impulse”. “Having said that, I am very happy to serve him in this ministry. God did not force my hand,” he says.
The Salvation Army Foundation is present throughout France. Indeed, there are more than 225 social and medico-social structures and services, represented in 32 departments and 12 regions, with 2,700 employees. Its main missions are to rescue, accompany and rebuild, a verbal trio that forms the Salvationist slogan. The association thus intervenes in the field of social and medico-social action, child and adolescent protection, disability, dependency and food relief. “I prefer a smaller but meaningful organization rather than all-out development that would take us away from our values,” says the colonel.