Saving souls: Southern evangelist visits Valley

BIG LAKE — When Georgia evangelist Leon Foote hears the trumpet sound calling him to heaven, he knows he’ll be ready. He just wants to be sure everyone else is as prepared for the Second Coming — which he feels will be soon.

“I don’t know what this cancer is going to do, but I’m going to keep on preaching and helping bring people to the Lord until it’s time for me to go,” said the 77-year-old Foote, who has been preaching the word of God for 58 years and is on his ninth trip to Alaska to preach in local churches over the next month. “When the doctor told me I had prostate cancer two days after Christmas, I learned it was very slow moving and that treatment could wait until after I got back home. I was coming up anyway, though.”

A graduate of Bob Jones University in 1958, Foote made his first trip to the Valley in 1988, to the Rainbow Bible Church at Mile 49 of the Parks Highway, and now he spends six-day stints at five local Baptist churches.

This time, he’ll conclude his trip on March 27 with a one-night appearance at Talkeetna Baptist.

This is the fourth time Foote’s visited Independent Baptist Church at Mile 2.5 Big Lake Road. He’s been there since last Sunday and is moving on to Immanuel Baptist in Palmer, where he’ll hold nightly sermons from Feb. 27 to March 2.

After that, he’ll be at Pilgrims Baptist in Wasilla from March 6 to 11, Rainbow Baptist from March 13 to 18, and Bible Baptist in Houston from March 20-25.

Independent Baptist’s Pastor Doug Ferrett said Thursday he’s loved Foote since first hearing him preach at Pilgrims Baptist about 12 years ago.

“He encourages people to walk with God,” said Ferrett, who’s been a pastor since 1985 after first serving as a missionary in Somali, Africa, in 1980. “He’s very practical in what he tells people so it doesn’t go way over their heads. He’s very Biblical.”

Ferrett said he was saved when he was only 5 years old, after his father, a long-haul trucker, showed him the way. When he was 14, he said he believes he was called to be a preacher.

Being deaf until the age of 7 and then being picked on by his peers for a speech impediment and dyslexia made him seek acceptance from both the Christian crowd and the not-so-Godly group in high school, he said.

“I just wanted to fit in, so I had the fastest car in high school and the wrong friends,” he said. “It was through an accident my brother had that I finally saw that I needed to keep with my commitment to God. He had fallen off the roof and ruptured his spleen. He came close to dying and if it weren’t for God’s help, he probably would have.”

During the pre-service dinner at his church Wednesday, Foote said two people already had accepted Jesus as their savior this week and he hopes the trend continues.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Foote said. “That’s why I do what I do. Bob Jones taught me that when you preach, don’t compromise — just preach what the Bible says. Everything in the Bible is true, cover-to-cover. You might not always understand everything it says, but what it says is true.”

Raised in south Alabama by parents who didn’t attend church, Foote said he was saved in the backseat of a car at age 12 while on his way to Sunday school.

“My brothers made fun of me, but they got over it,” he said. “I didn’t stop. I kept right on going.”

He said he was actually tricked into enrolling at Bob Jones University when he was told he could play football there. He found out the school had a soccer team, instead, which was totally foreign to him.

When it comes to professional football, however, Foote said he was terribly disappointed during a revival in the Lower 48 when the pastor of the church cut the week short so that he could watch a football game.

“People were getting right with God and with each other and by Wednesday it just died because of the football game,” Foote said, shaking his head. “That just killed the revival. And there was a fellow I was praying for to get saved and he never got saved because of that.”

Foote finds a lot of comfort, however, that his father was saved in the hospital just before he died of lung cancer. He’s not certain about his mother, though.

The most exciting revival Foote ever was a part of took place in New York.

“I was preaching and people got so stirred that one night 23 teenagers fell to their knees and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior,” he said with a glint in his light green eyes. “The next night, we burned in a big bonfire about $30,000 worth of rock records and pictures.”

Foote said he has shocked Elvis fans by destroying his vintage albums, but he makes no apologies.

“Do you know that Elvis went to J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to investigate the Beatles to see if they were subversive? I thought that was interesting since he was doing the exact same thing as the Beatles,” he said with a chuckle as Ferrett’s wife, Linda, played “Leave It There” on the sanctuary piano in the background.

As he headed upstairs to inspire another group of residents to continue on their paths to righteousness, Foote said that if he could sum up his 58 years of preaching in one sentence, it would be this:

“I have no regrets.”

For more information on Foote’s sermons at the various Valley churches this week, contact the churches. The public is invited to attend any of the sessions.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.