The stereotype of the hip, young pastor who comes to a town and mixes things up in a fresh new way – well, the Reverend Brett Foote of United Presbyterian Church may or may not consider himself one of those types, but he brings up the much-beloved sitcom The Office within a few moments of this interview’s beginning.
“I grew up near Scranton,” he said, pointing out that that is also the series’ location. “All those characters are real, by the way.”
Foote was born in Savannah, Georgia, but Pennsylvania was where he was raised. He remembers his life as a kid as being marked by struggles. “I grew up in a pretty impoverished house, despite my father having a good job there,” he recalled. “I can remember going to bed hungry. My economic reality wasn’t the greatest.”
As many youths with challenging home lives do, Foote found solace in the church. “I got connected through vacation Bible school,” he said. “There, my mom saw a woman pastor for the first time, and that led us to the Presbyterian church in our tiny little town.”
Church camps and Bible college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania followed in time for Foote, though that hadn’t necessarily been the plan. “I wanted to be in political science,” he said. “I wanted to work for the federal government. God had other plans for me.”
“While I was in school, I had the opportunity to study the Bible and cross-cultural communications and church-planting in Italy,” Foote said, “and that’s where I met my wife, Laura.”
They’ve been married 12 years, now. Eventually, the Footes returned to Pennsylvania, and Brett went to Princeton for his Masters of Divinity on a free ride. “It’s not everyone’s story,” he said, “but it was mine, and I’m very thankful for that.”
Foote’s particular area of study was disability ministry and trauma-based ministry, and he gained many skills in that department.
So, how did he get to Superior?
“My wife and I looked at a map,” Foote said. “Honest to goodness. We prayed and said ‘Where is God calling us?’ We both somehow ended up on [Superior]. Neither of us had been here, before.”
Foote investigated and found no openings for work in his field in Superior. “I said, well, y’know, it must’ve been some bad Taco Bell, and I thought it was the Holy Spirit,” he joked. “But I decided to look one last time. Sure enough, Superior popped up, and they’d been looking for three years.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn how to ice-fish,” Foote said in his opening email to the church. Today, he’s got five years of Superior living under his belt and he’s done just that, among many other things.
“I’ve learned to cross-country ski,” he said. “My wife has taken up surfing and coffee-roasting. We’ve planted community gardens. We help repair homes here in the city. I could go on and on.”
“We couldn’t imagine being somewhere else,” Foote said of he and his wife’s affection for their adopted hometown. “I mean, not Duluth. Not anywhere else. We love it.”
