A Reader’s Guide to Julia A. J. Foote

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 TIMOTHY 2:15

Julia Foote is the easiest author in this series to read in full. She left one small book, and a reader can finish it in two or three evenings. It is written plainly, in short chapters, and it keeps breaking off from the story to turn to the reader with an exhortation, a warning or a hymn. Some readers find that tiring; it is better to hear it as a preacher’s habit, carried onto the page. Her book is in the public domain.

Begin here

A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1879). Her only book, and in the Ochorus library. Read it straight through. If time is short, read these chapters first: My Conversion; Disobedience, but Happy Results, for her sanctification; A Call to Preach the Gospel and Heavenly Visitations Again; Public Effort — Excommunication; Women in the Gospel; and the three closing chapters, A Word to My Christian Sisters, Love not the World, and How to Obtain Sanctification, which are the nearest thing she left to written teaching.

A word on the text. The Ochorus edition was taken from a scan of an old printing, and here and there a word is broken or a Scripture reference misprinted. The chronology of her middle years is also hard to follow, and one or two dates seem not to fit. Read for the testimony rather than for the timetable.

Other words of hers

Beyond the memoir, very little of her own writing survives: a few short pieces and reported words, mostly from the church press of her later years. Readers who want to set her in the company of other Black women preachers of her century will find Bettye Collier-Thomas’s Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979 (1998) a valuable collection.

About Julia Foote

No full life of her has yet been widely published, and a reader should be wary of confident details that go beyond her own book. The best starting place is William L. Andrews’s edition, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (1986), which reprints her memoir alongside those of Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw, with a careful introduction. The facts of her later ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church are recorded in the histories of that church and in reference works on women in American religion.

Companions to her

Jarena Lee’s Religious Experience and Journal (1849) and Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs (1846) tell the stories of two earlier Black women preachers in the Methodist tradition, and read beside hers they show how much she shared with them. Amanda Berry Smith’s An Autobiography (1893), in the Ochorus library, is the fullest life of a Black holiness evangelist of the next generation, and wider in its travels. John Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, also in the Ochorus library, sets out the doctrine she inherited, in more careful terms than she had room for. Catherine Booth’s Female Ministry (1859) is a close contemporary defence of women preaching from the other side of the Atlantic.

Approach with care

Her chapters on sanctification. Read them for their hunger for holiness and their confidence in Christ. Where they teach that sin is destroyed at the root in a single moment, weigh them against the whole witness of Scripture, beginning with Philippians 3:12 and 1 John 1:8.

Heavenly Visitations Again. Her account of her call through visions. Read it with respect, and with 1 John 4:1 beside it, and do not make it a pattern for your own guidance.

A Word to My Christian Sisters. Precious for its courage, but read what she says about physicians with care, and do not let it keep anyone from medical help.

Three counsels for reading her

Read her with the Bible open. She quotes it on nearly every page, sometimes by memory and not always exactly, and she would want it checked. Read her for the burden rather than the system: where she presses a framework further than Scripture goes, take the hunger for holiness and leave the scaffolding. And read her as a sister, not a specimen. It is possible to study her as an important historical document, which she is, and miss that she wrote to bring you to Christ.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21