The Rt. Rev. Frank Alexander Juhan

Fourth Bishop of Florida

The Right Reverend Frank Alexander Juhan, sometimes called "the young people's bishop," was himself the youngest diocesan in the Episcopal Church when he was consecrated in 1924. He was to be the Bishop of Florida until 1956, when would retire as the Church's senior active bishop. By then he had been bishop through Florida's "boom and bust" of the 1920's, the Great Depression, World War II and ten years of recovery after the war.

Bishop Juhan was born in Macon, Georgia, but was brought up in San Antonio, Texas. He earned both the B.A. and B.A. degrees from the University of the South, when he was All-Southern football player, the captain of a championship team and the elected head of the student body. The university continued throughout his life to be one of his dearest interest; indeed after retiring from his episcopate, Bishop Juhan raised millions of dollars for his alma mater while serving, without pay, as its director of development.

After graduating from the university and being ordained in 1911, Bishop Juhan served as a missionary in Texas, as chaplain of the Sewanee Military Academy and, for eight years, as the rector of Christ Church, Greenville, South Carolina. Then he was called to Florida and was consecrated in St. John's Church, Jacksonville on November 25, 1924. In his first episcopal address he emphasized the importance of Christian education for the young; in his first summer in the diocese he organized and conducted a camp for young people; and early in the next year he persuaded the Diocese of South Florida to help him support programs of college ministry at the state universities in Gainesville and Tallahassee. He told the Diocesan Convention of 1927 that he had been putting "great emphasis ... on our young people's work," and that he felt justified in doing so because "there is no ground so rich in treasure for the future of Christ's Kingdom as that of childhood ... and there is no more blessed and blessing task in the whole world than taking the young by the hand and leading them to God."

The first five years of Bishop Juhan's episcopate were a time of prosperity for the state and growth for the diocese, but the end of the Florida real estate boom and the onset of the Great Depression brought on more than a decade of hard times and retrenchment. In the early 1930's the budgets were cut and so was the money sent to the National Church and Bishop Juhan's salary, the salaries of missionaries and other clergy, the number of clergy at work in the diocese (from thirty-one in 1929 to twenty-five in 1934) and the founding of new missions. The number of congregations in the diocese slipped from seventy in 1929 to sixty-two in 1933 and sixty in 1937. By then, however, the depression was beginning to loosen its grip on the diocese and in 1941, Bishop Juhan was able to say to his people, "It should be evident to all ... that the diocese had definitely stepped forward during the past three years." But he reminded them that America was then looking out at "a world that is filled with darkness and disaster.

World War II began before the Great Depression was fully over and it, too put great pressures on the Diocese of Florida. It added a new work to those the diocese was accustomed to doing the work of ministering to many thousand servicemen being trained within its borders, and it took from the diocese many of the tools with which to accomplish its work. Shortages of gasoline and tires, building materials, food and fuel hampered the diocese, but worse still was the shortage of clergymen. "Available clergymen, - wrote Bishop Juhan in 1942, "are becoming more and more scarce, due to the fact that so many of our men have gone into the Army or Navy as chaplains. - And a year later he wrote, "Believe me when I say that I can get four new tires and four hundred pounds of tenderloin easier than I can get able clergy now." Even so, Bishop Juhan was determined that no churches should be closed. And none were. Parish priest accepted extra charges; missioners were spread thin; retired clergy, chaplains stationed in Army and Navy bases and layreaders all helped; and no churches were closed. At the end of the war Bishop Juhan and that the diocesan organization was "shot" but that it was "positively astonishing" how much it had accomplished and how little had been lost.

After the war Bishop Juhan's long years of labor were rewarded with glowing success. Eleven missions became parishes in ten years, and sixteen new missions organized. The number of clergy at work grew from thirty-eight to fifty-eight, and the membership of the church almost doubled.

St. John's Church, Jacksonville, became St. John's Cathedral; a retirement for elderly women was established; the diocese got its first diocesan house with a bookstore; a Department of Christian Social Services was created; a coadjutor was elected and helped Bishop Juhan through his last eight years as diocesan. Bishop Juhan could turn the work over to his successor with a sense of accomplishment and an assurance that all was well with the Diocese of Florida. He retired in 1956, raised money for his beloved University of the South and died there in 1967. He was praised there as "Sewanee's guardian angel" and, in Florida, as "a man of humor, a man of courage. a man of compassion, a man of sport, but most of all a man of God, founder of new missions, builder of new parishes, pastor of the pastors of men and servant of the servant of God."