Frank Arthur Jenner was an Australian evangelist. His signature approach to evangelism was to ask people on George Street, Sydney, where would you be in eternity? Heaven or hell? He contracted African trypanosomiasis at the age of twelve and suffered from narcolepsy for the rest of his life. Jenner died from colorectal cancer in 1977.
About Frank Jenner in brief
Frank Arthur Jenner was an Australian evangelist. His signature approach to evangelism was to ask people on George Street, Sydney, where would you be in eternity? Heaven or hell? He contracted African trypanosomiasis at the age of twelve and suffered from narcolepsy for the rest of his life. Jenner died from colorectal cancer in 1977. While he was alive, very few people knew of him, but after he died, stories of his evangelistic activities circulated widely, and elements of some of these stories contradicted others. In 2000, Raymond Wilson published Jenner of George Street: Sydney’s Soul-Winning Sailor in an attempt to tell the story of Jenner’s life accurately. According to his posthumous biographer Raymond Wilson, Jenner was anti-authoritarian as a boy. Jenner was sent to work aboard a training ship for misbehaving boys during World War I. When he was fourteen, 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 soon joined the United States Navy. After some time, Jenner joined the Royal Navy, but deserted in New York City, United States. He subsequently worked for the Royal Australian Navy until he bought his way out in 1937. He married Jessie Peters, 23, a year later, at HMAS Cerberus in Melbourne. Jenner soon became one of the sailors assigned to travel to England to retrieve sailors delivered by HMAS Canberra.
In 1939, with the onset of World War II, he was recalled to active duty. He was serving on HMAS Australia in 1937 when he was discharged legally from the navy, but not receiving a pension. He later married Jessie and they continued to live in Melbourne after their wedding. In 1952, the Reverend Francis Dixon of Lansdowne Baptist Church in Bournemouth, England, began hearing several testimonies from people who became Christians after Jenner accosted them. The following year, Dixon met with Jenner in Australia and told him about the people he had met who had become Christians as a result of Jenner’s evangelism, and Jenner, then fifty years old, cried because he had not previously known that even one of those people had remained a Christian beyond their initial profession of faith. Jenner’s daughter stated 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 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 he kept for the remainder of his navy career. When the war ended, he returned to England. He then married Jessie, who invited him to his home to have a meal with his family including Jessie, Peters, and Charlie Peters.
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This page is based on the article Frank Jenner published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
