A Brand Plucked from the Fire is the short spiritual autobiography of Julia A. J. Foote (1823–1900), a nineteenth-century African American holiness preacher who became the first woman ordained a deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In fewer than a hundred pages she tells how a granddaughter of slavery, born in Schenectady, New York, was converted at fifteen, entered into what she called “full salvation,” heard an unmistakable call to preach, and then spent decades on the road as an evangelist — excommunicated by her own pastor for preaching, turned away from pulpits because she was a woman, and insulted on stages and canal boats because she was Black, yet never silenced. This study guide gives you the book’s shape, its central themes, and a way to read it that honors both its fire and its honesty. You can read the whole text free on Ochorus at A Brand Plucked from the Fire.
What the Book Is, and Who Julia Foote Was
The book is a testimony before it is anything else. Foote wrote it near the end of a long ministry, at the urging of friends, to “promote the cause of holiness in the Church.” Its title comes from the prophet’s vision in Zechariah 3:2, where the Lord rebukes the accuser over a soul described as “a brand plucked from the fire” — a scrap of wood snatched from the flames before it is consumed. Foote returns to that image again and again: as a child who drank a bottle of liquor and nearly died, as a girl mysteriously stopped in the middle of a dance, as a young convert lifted out of despair. She reads her whole life as a rescue.
Foote was born free but into a family shaped by bondage. Her father had been stolen as a child and enslaved; her mother, born a slave in New York State, was whipped and had the healing skin torn from her back. Foote records these facts plainly, and she records, too, the wound of a segregated church: her parents could not approach the Lord’s table until “the last white communicant had left.” She grew up with almost no schooling, because there were no schools that would take Black children where she lived; her father, who could barely read, taught her the alphabet himself. Out of that scarcity came a hunger for the Bible that never left her.
Her calling collided with two walls at once — race and sex. When God, as she understood it, commanded her to preach, she resisted precisely because she knew the cost. She had herself once opposed women preaching. What she suffered afterward gives the book its backbone.
The Story’s Arc
The narrative moves in a clear line. The early chapters are childhood: parentage, the alphabet learned at her father’s knee, an undeserved whipping from a foster family that made her, in her words, “quite a hardened sinner,” and a first and last attempt at dancing that ended when she felt “a heavy hand” on her arm. At fifteen she is converted at a quarterly meeting under a sermon on the “new song” of Revelation 14:3, and she rises from twenty hours in bed singing of redemption. Opening her Bible, her eyes fall on Isaiah 43:2 — “when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.”
The middle of the book is her pursuit of sanctification, or “entire holiness” — a definite second experience she believed cleansed the heart of indwelling sin. Her minister, class-leader, and parents all tell her the blessing is only for the aged or the dying. She disobeys her mother, visits “the old saints” who claim the experience, and receives it. Marriage follows, and a move to Boston, where she testifies to sanctification as “a second, distinct work of the Holy Ghost” and stirs both hunger and hostility. Her husband George, at sea for months at a stretch, turns against her teaching.
Then comes the hinge of the book: the call to preach. It arrives in visions — an angel with a scroll reading “Thee have I chosen to preach my Gospel without delay,” a solemn scene of washing and commissioning, and the settled words, “You have I chosen to go in my name and warn the people of their sins.” Her pastor, Jehial C. Beman, refuses her the pulpit, forbids the meetings she holds in homes, and finally excommunicates her for preaching. Her letter of appeal to the Conference is, she writes, “slightingly noticed, and then thrown under the table.” The remaining chapters follow her itinerant labors across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Canada, and the mid-Atlantic — revivals, closed doors, a slaveholder searching a house where she dined, a man on a canal boat demanding she be put out of the cabin. The book closes with direct appeals: a word to her Christian sisters, a warning against loving the world, and a final chapter on how to obtain sanctification.
The Central Themes
Sanctification and entire holiness. This is the doctrinal heart of the book and its reason for existing. Foote distinguishes conversion from a later, definite cleansing of the heart, and she insists it is available now, by faith, to the young as well as the old. She is careful about what she means: “I am not teaching absolute perfection, for that belongs to God alone,” but rather “Christian perfection — an extinction of every temper contrary to love.” Nearly every chapter is threaded with the language of Romans 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and Galatians 2:20 — being transformed, sanctified wholly, crucified with Christ so that Christ may live in her.
The call to preach. Foote devotes an entire chapter, “Women in the Gospel,” to defending a woman’s right to proclaim the Gospel, and it is some of the sharpest writing in the book. She points to Joel 2:28 and its fulfillment at Pentecost, to Philip’s four daughters who prophesied, to Paul’s women fellow-laborers. Against those who demanded she prove her call by a miracle, she turns the challenge around.
“If it be necessary to prove one’s right to preach the Gospel, I ask of my brethren to show me their credentials, or I can not believe in the propriety of their ministry.”
Julia A. J. Foote
Her defense rests finally on Galatians 3:28 — that in Christ there is “neither male nor female.” And she names the injustice without softening it: her appeal was ignored, she writes, because “it was only the grievance of a woman, and there was no justice meted out to women in those days.”
Perseverance through opposition. The book is, in large part, a record of being unwanted — by her pastor, by conferences, by trustees who would not seat her, by white congregations who would not let Black hearers in, and by the ordinary cruelties of a racist society. Foote does not hide the pain of it, especially when it came from fellow believers.
“It is no little thing to feel that every man’s hand is against us, and ours against every man, as seemed to be the case with me at this time; yet how precious, if Jesus but be with us.”
Julia A. J. Foote
She treats the indignities of race with the same unflinching honesty. Forced to sit in the cold night air of a steamer because “prejudice” would not let a Black woman into the cabin except as a servant, she cries out on the page:
“O Prejudice! thou cruel monster! wilt thou ever cease to exist?”
Julia A. J. Foote
What holds these strands together is Foote’s conviction that her commission came “from heaven,” not from human permission — and so no human refusal could revoke it. When her pastor pressed her to obey the discipline that forbade her to preach, she answered that she feared God more than man. Her dying father’s last words to her were to be faithful to her heavenly calling and to fear not to preach full salvation.
Who Should Read It
Read this book if you care about the roots of the American holiness movement, or about the long line of Black Christian witness in the North before and during the Civil War era. Read it if you are a woman who has sensed a call to teach or lead and met resistance for it; Foote wrote her final chapter, “A Word to My Christian Sisters,” expressly for you. Read it if you want a firsthand account of what ordinary church segregation felt like from inside the pew. And read it if you simply want a bracing, first-person testimony of assurance — short enough to finish in an evening, plain enough for any reader, and utterly certain of the God it describes.
It pairs naturally with another classic on Ochorus: An Autobiography by Amanda Berry Smith, another Black holiness woman who left home and family to preach across continents. Reading the two together shows you a whole tradition, not a single exception. You can also explore more of Foote’s life and writing on her author page, Julia A. J. Foote.
How to Read It Today
A few things help a modern reader. First, notice the frame: Foote is not writing a memoir for its own sake but preaching through her life story, so nearly every episode ends in an appeal to “dear reader.” If you expect a diary, the sermons between the scenes may feel like interruptions; read them instead as the point.
Second, take her theology on its own terms before you weigh it. Whether or not you hold her view of a distinct second work of grace, follow how she argues it from Scripture — from Ezekiel’s promise of a new heart, from Hebrews 4:15, from Ephesians 2:8 — and you will understand the holiness movement far better than any summary can teach you. Her long “threshing sermon” on Micah 4:13 is a rare chance to watch a nineteenth-century woman preacher actually preach on the page.
Third, let the racial and gendered violence land. Foote does not sensationalize it, and she does not let it embitter her, but she also refuses to pretend it away. Her honesty about the church’s failures — the segregated communion table, the pastor who lied to be rid of her, the “brethren” who threw her petition under the table — is part of her Christian witness, not a detour from it. Read those passages slowly, and read her warnings to the world in her closing chapters, drawn from 1 John 2:15, as the mature reflection of someone who had counted the cost.
“How much easier to bear the reproach of men than to live at a distance from God.”
Julia A. J. Foote
For Reflection
Use these questions on your own or in a group after reading:
- Foote reads every rescue in her life — from the liquor bottle, from the dance floor, from despair — as being “plucked from the fire.” Where can you trace that same pattern of rescue in your own story?
- She resisted her call to preach partly because she knew what it would cost her in reputation and relationships. When have you sensed a leading you were reluctant to follow, and what made you hesitate?
- Foote insisted her commission was “from heaven,” so that human refusal could not cancel it. How do you discern between a genuine calling and mere self-will — and how did she?
- Some of her deepest wounds came not from the world but from fellow Christians. How should a believer carry injuries inflicted inside the church without growing hard?
- Whatever you make of her doctrine of entire holiness, what would it look like to desire, as she did, “an extinction of every temper contrary to love”?
When you have finished, begin the text itself — A Brand Plucked from the Fire — and let Julia Foote tell it in her own unquenchable voice.
