Plucked from the Burning

I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning. AMOS 4:11

A hard inheritance. Julia Foote was born in 1823 in Schenectady, New York, her mother’s fourth child. Her father had been born free but was stolen as a child and enslaved; her mother was born a slave in the State of New York, and the first pages of the memoir record, without softening, a whipping her mother received from a master for refusing to submit herself to him. Her father in time bought his own freedom, then his wife’s, then their first child’s. When her parents joined the Methodist Episcopal church they were made to sit in a corner of the gallery and wait to take communion until the last white communicant had left the table. She grew up knowing the church could humiliate as well as bless, and she never left it.

The black bottle. Her parents kept drink in the house. At five years old she found the chest unlocked, drained the bottle, and was so ill that her life was despaired of. It was the first time, she says, that she was a brand plucked from the burning. It would not be the last.

Learning the alphabet. There were no schools where Black children were allowed, and her father could only spell out a little of the New Testament. When she asked him to teach her the letters he told her he hardly knew them himself, and then taught her anyway. She could say the whole alphabet at nine. At ten she was sent to work for a childless family named Prime in the country, who were kind to her and sent her to a country school. There she was learning to read when her schoolteacher shot a woman dead in a rage and was publicly hanged; the child saw the execution and was haunted by it for many nights. Not long after, Mrs Prime accused her of stealing cakes she had not taken and whipped her with a rawhide. She cut the rawhide to pieces with an axe and walked home through the woods before dawn.

The new song. Her family moved to Albany and joined an African Methodist church there, and for the first time she began to understand what religion was. She resolved to serve God, broke the resolution, and drifted into parties and dances. At fifteen, at a Sunday evening quarterly meeting, a sermon on the new song of the redeemed in the book of Revelation broke her. She fell to the floor, lay insensible for many hours in an agony of conviction, cried to God for mercy, and rose singing. A week later, doubting because she had not been converted at the altar in the usual way, she was steadied by her minister, who told her that it is faith in Christ that saves, not the altar or the preacher.

Inward foes. Six months later a younger brother accidentally struck her in the eye, and she lost the sight of it. The anger and pride that rose in her frightened her. Her minister, her class-leader and her parents told her this was the common lot of Christians until death. She could not believe it. When an elderly couple came to the church testifying that the blood of Jesus had cleansed them wholly, she knew what she needed. Forbidden by her mother to visit them, she went anyway, the first time she had deliberately disobeyed her. A few days later the old woman came to her with her Bible and marked passage after passage. Two days after that, alone and waiting on the Lord, she received what she had been seeking. She called it sanctification, and she never afterwards preached anything else for long.

Boston. While still very young she married George Foote, a sailor, who had professed faith in Christ in the same church. They went to Boston, where he found work, and where she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation. At her first class-meeting she testified to her conversion and to sanctification as a second, distinct work of the Holy Ghost. Her husband, who had once been sympathetic, grew hostile, told her she was getting more crazy every day, and went to sea.

The call. For months she had been exhorting and praying from house to house. Then came the summons she had been dreading: to preach. She had always spoken against women preaching. For about two months she resisted and fell ill, and was brought, through what she describes as a series of visions, to say that she would go. Her minister, Jehiel C. Beman, told her coldly that she would soon find out her mistake. When she began holding meetings in a brother’s home and then in her own, he sent committees, demanded that she submit to the rules, and had her put out of the church. She took a letter to the Conference asking for a fair hearing. It was, she says, slightingly noticed and thrown under the table.

On the road. She went anyway. With a few sisters she hired a hall in Philadelphia and held meetings for eleven nights. She preached across New York State and on into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit and Canada, often with her companion Ann M. Johnson. Her memoir records Baltimore, where she and Sister Johnson were examined for marks in case they were runaway slaves; a canal boat where a man called her a racial slur and demanded her berth; a night on a steamboat deck in the cold because her colour barred her from the cabin; and a white church in Zanesville, Ohio, opened to Black hearers for the first time because of her meetings. News came that her husband had died at sea. Her father died in May 1849, and his last words to her were that she should be faithful to her heavenly calling and fear not to preach full salvation. The memoir’s chronology in these years is hard to follow, and this chapter does not force it.

Cleveland. In the early 1850s she settled in Cleveland, Ohio, which remained her home. There a throat affliction silenced her for several years; Sister Johnson died in 1856, and in time her mother too. Later she was healed, and a great wave of holiness revival in Ohio sent her out again, she wrote, like a ship with chart and compass. In 1879 she published her memoir.

At the last. She went on preaching for another twenty years. In 1894 the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the communion whose Boston minister had expelled her half a century before, ordained her a deacon, the first woman it had ordained to that office. Shortly before her death she was ordained an elder, the second woman in that church to receive it. She died in 1900. The church that had cast her out received her, at the end, as one of its own ministers.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. She was humiliated in church from her parents’ generation onward and never left it. Is there a church wound you have allowed to become a reason to stay away? Bring it to God honestly this week.

2. Her father taught her the alphabet he hardly knew himself. Whom could you teach something you only partly know — to read, to pray, to open the Bible?

3. She went to the old couple her mother had forbidden. Is there anyone who might lead you into deeper things whom you have been avoiding out of fear of what others will say?

4. Her call cost her membership, marriage peace and security. Name one thing that obedience to God is likely to cost you, and count the cost with Him in prayer.

5. Read her own chapters on her childhood and conversion in the Ochorus library this week.

A PRAYER

Lord, You snatched Julia Foote out of the fire again and again, as a child, as a girl, as a woman thrust out of her church, and You never let her go.

You have snatched me out of the fire too, though I have often forgotten it. Give me her gratitude.

Where the church has hurt me, keep me from bitterness. Where I have hurt others in Your name, show me, and make me put it right.

Keep me to the end, and let me finish my course as she finished hers, with my eyes on You. Amen.