Ryan Duffey Strode (born May 25, 1977) is an American former street preacher who, as a 10-year-old child, became the subject of nationwide controversy in the 1980s for his idiosyncratic style of preaching.
David Strode told reporters his children's preaching was necessitated by racial integration, the teaching of evolution and sex education in public schools.
[1] In the summer of 1988, Strode appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, multiple times on Sally,[5] and at least 14 other television talk-show hosts sought interviews with the preaching children who had become a source of controversy in their mountain town.
[4] He began dating Kim Ellington, a girl who attended New Manna Baptist Church, the Marion, North Carolina, megachurch that had previously thrown the Strode family out.
In November 1997, Duffey and Ellington, then aged 20 and 19 years, respectively, 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.