Frank Jenner

Frank Arthur "Bones" Jenner (surname often misspelled Genor) (November 2, 1903 - May 8, 1977) was an English Australian evangelist whose signature approach to evangelism was to ask people on George Street, Sydney the question "If you died within 24 hours, where would you be in eternity? Heaven or hell?" He was born in Southampton, Hampshire. At the age of 12, during World War I, he was sent to work aboard a training ship for misbehaving boys. While the ship was docked at a port in West Africa, he was bitten by a tsetse fly, contracted African trypanosomiasis, and suffered from narcolepsy for the rest of his life. He eventually joined the Royal Navy, but deserted in New York and joined the United States Navy. When he was 24, he deserted again, this time in Australia. There, he met Jessie Peters, who he married in 1929.

In 1937, Jenner encountered a group of men of the Glanton Exclusive Brethren who were engaging in open-air preaching, and he converted to Christianity. Jessie initially thought that he had become manic or insane, but she became a Christian later that year. They became part of the Glanton Brethren for a time, but switched to the Open Brethren in the 1940s. For 28 years, from his initial conversion until his debility from Parkinson's disease, Jenner engaged in personal evangelism, probably speaking with more than 100,000 people in total. He aimed to talk with ten different people every day. One of the people who became a Christian after having been asked Jenner's question was Noel Stanton, who went on to found the Jesus Army.

In 1952, The Reverend Francis Willmore Dixon of Lansdowne Baptist Church in Bournemouth, England began hearing several Christian testimonies from people who converted to Christianity after having been accosted on George Street, Sydney by a man who asked them whether they were going to heaven or hell. The following year, he travelled to Australia to engage in itinerant preaching and, after hearing several more such stories, eventually found Jenner. Dixon told Jenner about the people he had met who had become Christians as a result of Jenner's evangelism, and Jenner, now 50 years old, cried because he had not previously known that even one of the people he had talked to had converted. Jenner died from colorectal cancer in 1977. While he was alive, very few people knew of him, but after he died, tales of his evangelistic activities circulated widely and the details of his life became exaggerated and falsified. Apocryphal accounts were common until 2000, when 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. Exaggerated stories about Jenner's evangelism continued to be written by such people as Ray Comfort and Ché Ahn, but more accurate accounts began to circulate as well, such as in the 2013 documentary film The Frank Jenner Question, directed by Gary Wilkinson.

Early life
Frank Arthur Jenner was born on November 2, 1903 in Southampton, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom. He had platinum blond hair. His father was a hotel pub owner and former sea captain. Jenner had four brothers. He 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 he eventually recovered. Thenceforward, he suffered from excessive daytime sleepiness and was eventually diagnosed with narcolepsy, which prevented him from ever being able to driving a car. When the war ended, he returned to England.

Navy career


Jenner eventually joined the Royal Navy, but deserted in New York City, New York, United States. He soon joined the United States Navy, with which he learned how to gamble. He quickly 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. He then met Jessie, Peters' 23-year-old daughter. Jessie and Jenner married each other 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.

Conversion to Christianity


In 1937, Jenner encountered a group of men of 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. 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 wasn't providing for his family. For both of these reasons, Jessie left Jenner and moved to Corowa to work on a farm there, taking Ann with her. She said that she would return only when Jenner regained his sanity. On several occasions, he agressively 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 because of their lack of money, so 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 normally went to sleep around 9:30 PM so that he could wake up to pray at 5 AM. 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.

Evangelism


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 an 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 felt convicted for several months afterwards and consequently converted to Christianity the next year. Stanton went on to found the Jesus Army. In 1945, Jenner approached Norrie Jeffs, who had just returned from participating in Operation Meridian at Palembang on Sumatra, and, having asked Jeffs his question, Jeffs responded that he was already a Christian. Jenner then invited Jeffs over to his house, where Jeffs met several other visitors including the woman who would later become his wife. In 1952, another person Jenner accosted with his question on George Street was Ian Boyden, a man from Roseville who was serving in the Royal Australian Air Force at the time. After having a brief conversation with Jenner, Boyden accepted Jenner's invitation to attend a church service at Renwick Gospel Hall, where he responded to the sermon by committing to living as a Christian thenceforward, which he did for at least 50 years. 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.

When Dave Rosten, another Sydney evangelist, attempted to imitate Jenner's method of evangelism, he was punched in the midriff by the first person he spoke to, so he decided that Jenner's approach to evangelism was not for others to emulate. In 1947, Jenner asked his question to a man on George Street named Angus Carruthers, who responded that he was a Christian and going to heaven. Jenner invited Carruthers back to his home, where Carruthers met Jenner's daughter, Ann. Carrthers and Ann married three years later.

Discovery by Francis Dixon


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 having met Jenner on George Street, Sydney on September 2, 1945 and having been asked his question. 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 to England, Dixon went on to discover another person who had become a Christian because of Jenner in Bournemouth and another at the Keswick Convention in Keswick, Cumbria. In 1957, Dixon was preaching in Ooty, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu, India and spoke about Jenner, where an Australian missionary said that she was another. In 1961, Dixon went to Jamaica and spoke about Jenner at a Congregational church near Kingston, and an Australian there told Dixon that he had also become a Christian because of having been asked Jenner's question on George Street. 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. Dixon's wife Nancy wrote an account of Jenner's evangelism, which she called "The Jenner Story".

Later life


In later years, Jenner developed Parkinson's disease and therefore went into retirement. With money that Jessie had inherited, the couple moved to Bexley in 1953, where they began attending Bexley Gospel Hall. 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. His body was given a police escort to the burial, which took place at Woronora Lawn Cemetery. His wife died two years later.

Legacy
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 broadly. Tales of his evangelistic activities generated a largely oral tradition in which the details of Jenner's life became exaggerated and various false elements were introduced, and some apocryphal accounts were written. Many storytellers said that Jenner was small in stature and that he had white hair; neither of these descriptions is true. An account containing this inaccurate description of Jenner was published in Counsel Magazine in 1996.



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 inaccurate 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 wrote that Jenner's question of "heaven or hell" was very similar to that of Arthur Stace, another Australian street evangelist who wrote the word "Eternity" on the sidewalks so people would consider where they would be in eternity. 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 "travelled 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. The people Wilson interviewed included Nancy Dixon; Ann and Angus Carruthers, Jenner's daughter and son-in-law; Murray Wilkes; Ian Boyden; Tas McCarthy; Peter Culver; Noel Stanton; and Mary Stares.

Nonetheless, exaggerated and inaccurate accounts of Jenner's life continued to propogate at least as late as 2011. One such inaccurate account of Jenner's evangelism was recorded by Ray Comfort on the Living Waters website and then repeated in the 2006 book Spirit-led Evangelism: Reaching the Lost through Love and Power by Ché Ahn. In these accounts, Jenner is referred to as "Mr. Genor". Another similarly inaccurate account was published online by ASSIST News Service in 2011.

In the 2011 book He Must Be the One: A Verse-by-Verse Study of Colossians, Dino Pedrone recounted the story of Jenner's evangelism as discovered by Francis Dixon. A similar account appeared in the 2012 book Evangelism: The Road Less Travelled by Gene R. Simowitz. In 2013, Gary Wilkinson produced and directed a documentary film about Jenner called The Frank Jenner Question, in which he interviewed Jenner's daughter and several of the people who had become Christians because of his 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. Claire Goodwin also encouraged people to emulate Jenner by including an account of his evangelism in her 2013 book Compelled to Tell: A Fascinating Journey from a New York Dead-End Street to a Lifetime of Ministry and Soul-Winning.