Frank Arthur Jenner was born on November 2, 1903, in Southampton, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom. His father was a hotel pub owner and former sea captain. Jenner had four brothers. According to his posthumous biographer Raymond Wilson, Jenner was anti-authoritarian as a boy and, at the age of 12, during World War I, he was sent to work aboard a training ship for misbehaving boys. When he was 14, the ship sailed from Southampton to Cape Town, South Africa. On the way, while the ship was docked at a port in West Africa, a tsetse fly bit Jenner and infected him with Trypanosoma; he therefore contracted African trypanosomiasis, which is also called "sleeping sickness". He subsequently entered a 15-day coma, but eventually recovered. Thenceforward, he suffered from excessive daytime sleepiness and was eventually diagnosed with narcolepsy, which prevented him from ever being able to drive a car. When the war ended, he returned to England.
Jenner eventually joined the Royal Navy, but deserted in New York City, New York, United States. He soon joined the United States Navy. Jenner's daughter said in an interview after his death that he learned how to gamble during this time and he soon developed the impulse control disorder of problem gambling. He became particularly attached to the game craps, which was popular in the United States at the time. He started to keep a rabbit's foot in the left upper pocket of his shirt, and would rub it with his left hand while he rolled the dice with his right. His shipmates therefore began calling him "Bones", a nickname that he retained for the rest of his navy career.
When he was 24, the United States Navy took him to Melbourne, Australia, and he deserted again. There, he met Charlie Peters, who invited him to his home to have a meal with his family. There, he met Jessie, Peters' 23-year-old daughter. Jessie and Jenner married a year later, on July 6, 1929, at HMAS Cerberus. They continued to live in Melbourne after their wedding, and Jenner joined the Royal Australian Navy. He soon became one of the sailors assigned to travel to England to retrieve HMAS Canberra. He was serving on HMAS Australia in 1937 when he was legally discharged from the navy, buying his way out but not receiving a pension.
In 1939, with the onset of World War II, Jenner was recalled to active duty. Because of his narcolepsy, he was given shore duties in Sydney. In this capacity, he participated in undercover operations and delivered sealed orders. After the war, he left the navy and became a janitor for IBM.
In 1937, Jenner encountered a group of men from the Glanton Exclusive Brethren standing in front of the National Australia Bank on Collins Street. One of the men was engaging in open-air preaching and using the phrase "Good News" to refer to the gospel. Jenner interrupted the man to say that he would listen to the man's good news provided that he was allowed to share some good news first. The man agreed, so Jenner taught the group of Brethren how to play craps there on the pavement. Then, one of the Brethren invited Jenner into his home for tea and told him about the gospel. Jenner then converted to Christianity and, when he went home, told Jessie that she was a sinner bound for hell and therefore in need of salvation. According to Wilson's biography of Jenner, Jessie thought that Jenner had become manic or insane. They had a young daughter named Ann by this point, and Jenner was gambling so much that he was not providing for his family. For both of these reasons, Jessie left Jenner and moved to Corowa to work on a farm, taking Ann with her. She said that she would return only when Jenner regained his sanity. On several occasions, he aggressively told Jessie's brothers that they needed to become Christians, which angered them. On one of these occasions, their conversation became physical and they began punching each other. The brothers rejected Jenner and were never reconciled to him. He also wrote to his family back in England, telling them about his religious conversion and asking them to become Christians as well, but they did not respond.
Later in 1937, Jessie became seriously infected with boils and, while under the care of a Glanton Brethren family, converted to Christianity. Before the end of the year, Jenner and Jessie began living together again. Although Jenner gave up gambling, he was often unemployed because he would evangelize at his workplace and then be fired. In 1939, Jessie developed a peptic ulcer. At the time, it was believed that such ulcers were caused by stress, and Jessie's ulcer was therefore attributed to the stress induced by the family's lack of money. Consequently, she and Ann moved to India to live with Jenner's aunt Emily McKenzie, who ran the Kotagiri Keswick Missionary Home. Ann subsequently attended Hebron School until she was 10 years old. Once Jessie had recovered from her illness, they returned to Sydney on SS Oronsay.
Jenner would normally wake up to pray at 5 AM each day. In the 1940s, Jenner left the Glanton Brethren and joined the Open Brethren. For the rest of his life, Jenner attended Open Brethren churches: one on Goulburn Street and the other in Bexley. At these churches, people did not understand what narcolepsy was and thought that Jenner was consistently falling asleep during services because he lacked respect for God. The church on Goulburn Street also disapproved of his partnership with other Christian organizations and churches; Jenner actively partnered with The Navigators, Campaigners for Christ, Baptists, Anglicans, and Methodists.
Out of gratitude to God for giving him salvation, Jenner committed to consistently engaging in personal evangelism, and aimed to talk with ten different people every day thenceforward. For 28 years, from his initial conversion until his debility from Parkinson's disease, Jenner engaged in this form of evangelism, probably speaking with more than 100,000 people in total, hundreds of whom made initial professions of conversion to Christianity. He kept religious tracts in his shirt pocket where he had previously kept his rabbit's foot, and he often gave these tracts to people he met. He also kept a card in his pocket with Philippians 4:13 on it in order to give himself courage in evangelizing. This verse reads, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." While engaging in these activities, Jenner would normally wear a white shirt, black shoes, and trousers, and sometimes a navy greatcoat. Normally evangelizing on George Street, Sydney, Jenner asked many people the same question: "If you died within 24 hours, where would you be in eternity? Heaven or hell?" If they were willing to engage in conversation with him, he would invite them either to his home or to a local church. The question became known as "the Frank Jenner question." Jenner was most active in evangelism during World War II. On Saturday nights during the war, Jenner would invite groups of sailors to his home for a service consisting of some hymns and a short sermon.
One of the people to whom Jenner posed his question was Noel Stanton, a man from Bedfordshire in the East of England who was serving in Sydney with the Royal Navy at the time. Stanton became preoccupied with the memory of this meeting for several months afterwards and consequently converted to Christianity the next year. Stanton went on to found the Jesus Army. Many other people who had a brief encounter with Jenner on the street in Sydney also converted to Christianity, but Jenner did not realize that any of the people he accosted had remained a Christian beyond their initial profession of faith until 1953, when Francis Dixon told him the stories of several such people.
The Reverend Francis Willmore Dixon was the head pastor of Lansdowne Baptist Church in Bournemouth, England, and his youth pastor, Peter Culver, had become a Christian as a result of meeting Jenner on George Street on September 2, 1945. In 1952, at an All Nations Bible College event, Dixon and Culver had heard Noel Stanton's Christian testimony, which included the episode in which Stanton had met Jenner. Dixon then realized that Culver and Stanton must have become Christians as a result of the same man. The following year, Dixon heard two different British sailors who did not know each other tell their testimonies at Lansdowne Baptist Church, and both had told very similar stories to Culver and Stanton; both had been walking down George Street and had been asked Jenner's question.
Dixon then travelled to Australia with his wife to engage in itinerant preaching there. There, Dixon hoped to find Jenner, whose name he did not yet know. In Adelaide, Dixon told the stories of Culver and Stanton while preaching. Murray Wilkes then approached Dixon and said that he had also become a Christian after having been asked Jenner's question on George Street. At a Methodist church in Perth, Dixon told Culver's, Stanton's, and Wilkes' stories again, and met yet another person who had converted to Christianity after an encounter with Jenner. Finally arriving in Sydney, Dixon asked Alec Gilchrist of Campaigners for Christ if he knew a man who asked strangers on George Street whether or not they were headed for heaven or hell. Gilchrist was familiar with Jenner and connected Dixon with him. Dixon visited Jenner at his house and told him about all the people he had met who had converted to Christianity because of Jenner's evangelism. Jenner, now 50 years old, had never before heard of even one person living their lives as Christians as a result of his evangelism, and he cried upon hearing that there were several.
After returning from Australia, Dixon went on to discover more people who had become Christians because of Jenner in Bournemouth, Cumbria, India, and Jamaica. By 1979, Dixon had discovered 10 people who had become Christians as a result of Jenner's evangelism. It is because of Dixon that the story of Jenner's evangelism began to be told.
Towards the end of his life, Jenner developed dementia and his narcolepsy worsened. For six months, he was confined to a bed and was treated with amphetamine. He was then diagnosed with colorectal cancer and spent a subsequent ten days at Calvary Hospital, Kogarah, New South Wales, where he died at 11:45 PM on May 8, 1977 at the age of 73. Because he had befriended so many police officers towards the end of his life, his body was given a police escort to the burial, which took place at Woronora Lawn Cemetery. His wife died two years later.
While Jenner was alive, very few people knew of him, and the effects of his evangelism were largely unrecognized. After his death, however, stories about his evangelism circulated widely. Tales of his evangelistic activities generated a largely oral tradition, and elements of some stories contradicted others. Many storytellers said that Jenner was small in stature and that he had white hair; this description is contradicted by interviews with family members.
In 2000, Raymond Wilson published a book called Jenner of George Street: Sydney's Soul-Winning Sailor in an attempt to tell the story of Jenner's life accurately. Jenner's family had been finding it painful to have alternate accounts of Jenner's life circulating around the world, so they gave Wilson all the information he desired. Wilson wrote that Jenner was "eccentric... the very antithesis of the 'wise', 'mighty', and 'noble'," but that his life was therefore a good demonstration of 2 Corinthians 12:9, which states that God's "power is made perfect in weakness." Wilson called Jenner a battler and did not recommend that his readers emulate Jenner's evangelistic activities "unless Divinely fitted in a similar way." Wilson wrote that he "traveled and corresponded widely to ascertain the facts of the story" and that he personally verified the accuracy of the information by retrieving first-hand accounts from all of the major figures in Jenner's life.
In 2013, Gary Wilkinson produced and directed The Frank Jenner Question, a documentary film featuring interviews with Jenner's daughter and people who had become Christians because of Jenner's evangelism. Also that year, Siobhan Livingston released her self-published book called Go! Sharing Jesus is Easy, in which she encouraged Christians to tell people about their faith as Jenner had done. She devotes an entire chapter of her book to Jenner, using Wilson's Jenner of George Street as her source text. In this chapter, she suggests that those of her readers who are not good at public speaking or who do not have extensive knowledge of the Bible should learn from Jenner's life that such skills are not required in order to evangelize. Livingston compared the impact of Jenner's evangelistic activities to the account in the Gospel of John of the Feeding of the 5,000, a miracle of Jesus in which Jesus multiplied a small meal so much that it was able to feed 5,000 people.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Jenner
Short YouTube video of Jenner’s story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNkGxfd6nho
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Oracio
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