Duffey Strode


Ryan Duffey Strode is a former street preacher who, as a 10 year old child, became the subject of nationwide controversy in the 1980s.

Overview

Duffey Strode and his family made national news in 1988 when 10 year old Duffey, his 6-year-old sister Pepper and 5-year-old brother Matthew began preaching Bible scripture outside their Marion, North Carolina elementary school. The boys' idiosyncratic style of preaching consisted of bellowing rote-learned excerpts from the Bible at their classmates. Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and at least fifteen other television talk-show hosts wanted to hear the preaching children, who had become the scourge of their North Carolina mountain town.
After six months of media attention and many school suspensions, Duffey Strode's parents, David and Robin Strode, agreed to keep their children away from the school and educate the three themselves.
As an adolescent, Duffey began dating Kim Ellington, a girl who had grown up going to New Manna Baptist, the Marion, North Carolina megachurch that had thrown the Strode family out. He left home in June 1997 to live with a punk rocker friend and the Strode family would not speak to him for 10 months. In November 1997, Duffey, age 20, and Kim Ellington, age 19, were married at the Marion Community Center, where the Strode family had once faced hundreds of angry townspeople at a filming of The Sally Jessy Raphael Show. David, Robin, Pepper, and Matthew Strode did not attend the wedding.