“short and boring” Bio
Eric Ludy is the president of Ellerslie Mission Society and the bestselling author of eighteen books on Christian thought and living. Ludy functions as the director of Ellerslie Discipleship Training in Windsor, Colorado and serves as the teaching pastor at Ellerslie’s campus church.
“A Little longer” Bio
Eric Ludy serves as the President of Ellerslie Mission Society. He is also a teaching pastor at the Church at Ellerslie and the lead instructor in the Ellerslie Discipleship Training.
Eric is the bestselling author of eighteen books which have sold over a million copies and been translated into over a dozen languages around the world. Eric has become a highly respected voice in the Church today, especially on the topics of biblical sexuality, manhood, prayer, and the deeper Christian life. His best-known books include Wrestling Prayer, The Bravehearted Gospel, and When God Writes Your Love Story.
For the past twenty-five years, Eric has been a popular speaker at colleges, conferences, and events, and has been a guest on nearly every major Christian radio platform.
Eric and his wife Leslie have six beautiful children, four of whom were adopted. The Ludy family lives in Windsor, Colorado where they conspire as a family daily to take the world for Jesus Christ.
Eric, The Christian
Eric Ludy was born on December 17, 1970 to Winston and Barbara Ludy, a strong Christian couple who highly valued the Scriptures and were hungry to live out an authentic Christian life. His parents’ convictions proved a strong influence upon his young soul, and Ludy yielded his life to the Person of Jesus at the age of five while sitting on his mother’s lap. Ludy grew up exposed to many differing denominational perspectives within the Christian Church, but never proved either hungry for spiritual matter or thirsty for greater understanding of the Kingdom of his Lord throughout his pre-college years. His mother and sister believed strongly in the power of prayer and wielded their confidences in the direction of God winning over Ludy’s young soul. The effect was quite dramatic. For though he had never shown much of a spiritual spark of givenness to the great Gospel commission since his commitment at the age of five, in his Whitworth College dorm room on February 2, 1990, Ludy encountered God Almighty and was forever altered. “My new life began that day!” Ludy declares. It was after reading the book No Compromise: The Life Story of Keith Green, that everything seemed to suddenly click, and Ludy found himself on his knees before the Living God letting go of life as he had always known it. “From that day,” Ludy says, “I have been all about Jesus Christ.”
What is Eric Ludy’s Denomination, you ask?
When Eric Ludy is asked about his denominational leanings, he very simply says, “Just stick Leonard Ravenhill, C.T. Studd, Hudson Taylor, Rees Howells, and Charles Spurgeon into a blender, and that’s pretty close to what I believe.” Ludy is a “deeper life” advocate, as well as a strong proponent of the supremacy of Christ and the sufficiency of the Word of God.
The following is the dedication in the front of his Ellerslie Training Curriculum in May of 2010:
I have found spiritual gold in many different places throughout my life. Outside of my dear parents and Leslie’s parents, there are twenty-six greats from the past two centuries that have most influenced my Christian thinking and living in our modern times. And since their thoughts are found speckled throughout these notes, I wish to honor them here, as a reminder to all the students gleaning wisdom from this training, that the strongest Christian leaders are but a consecrated quotation of the giants of faith who have proceeded them – C.T. Studd, Hudson Taylor, George Müller, Rees Howells, AW Tozer, William Booth, Amy Carmichal, Richard Wurmbrand, Leonard Ravenhill, Paris Reidhead, Corrie ten Boom, George Whitefield, John Wesley, David Brainerd, Charles Spurgeon, EM Bounds, John Hyde, Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, Keith Green, Jackie Pullinger, DL Moody, Major Ian Thomas, Gladys Aylward, David Wilkerson, and Oswald Chambers. I dearly desire my life to be a quotation of such an audacious band of mighties.
Eric, The Husband
Eric Ludy’s name rarely is said without mention of his wife, Leslie. The two names have been jointly representative of purity, beauty, and excellence in marriage since their inspiring pre-marriage relationship culminated in covenant vows in December of 1994. As artistically detailed in their book, When Dreams Come True, the Ludy’s unique love story caught the fancy of an onlooking generation in the mid-nineties. Their moral and ethical value system literally shocked and inspired hundreds of thousands, and their choice to save their first kiss until their wedding day dropped the jaw of sin-saturated America. And while the Ludy love story was known by many in the mid-nineties, the Ludys’ connectivity with the topics of purity and godly relationships really took off in 1998, when their collaborative work When God Writes Your Love Story was published and spent 18 months on the bestsellers list. It has continued to be one of the top-selling Christian relationships books of all time. Eric and Leslie have been happily married now for twenty-five years and still believe they have the most romantic love story in the history of the world.
Eric, The Father
Eric Ludy has six children with his wife, Leslie. Hudson, his firstborn, arrived in December of 2004 (just after their ten-year anniversary celebration), and this began a beautiful new season in Ludy’s life and a great expansion to his message. After a painful miscarriage in 2006, God unfolded a dramatic story of adoption, bringing a five-month-old Korean girl named Harper to the Ludy home in July of 2007, her arrival coinciding almost perfectly with the expected due date of the previously miscarried life. In 2008, the Ludy’s adopted again, but this time a boy – Kipling. And while they were in the hospital picking up their brand new little baby, Leslie discovered that she was expecting a baby! Seven months later, Avonlea was born on Father’s Day in June of 2009. In April 2012, Eric and Leslie were approached by an orphan ministry in Haiti, asking if they would consider adopting two babies in crisis, who at the time were only a few months old. The Ludys answered, “yes” and thus began the twenty-nine month battle to bring those two wee ones home. In October of 2014, the arduous journey culminated in the beautiful coming together of a family of eight.
As is evidenced in this website, the issues of fatherhood are claiming more and more of a prominent place in Eric’s focus and ministerial direction.
Eric, The Author
In 1995, when Eric Ludy’s first book was published, he was 24 years old. When this first manuscript began to permeate the Church’s awareness back in the mid-nineties, it led to invites all across the globe to speak and to train. For the next ten years, Eric and Leslie traveled extensively around the world, passionately training the younger generation in what they referred to as the “set-apart life,” one wholly consecrated unto Jesus Christ. Ludy pulled back in his travels in 2005 and began to focus on putting in print the messages that were burdening his soul. From 2005 to 2008, Eric and his wife Leslie Ludy churned out eleven published books, which were to lay the foundation for their ministry work today. Ludy considers his works The Bravehearted Gospel and Wrestling Prayer to be his two most important messages. In these two books a new voice emerged in his writing. It was a stronger, more forceful eloquence in defense of the wholly consecrated life, the unchanging nature of the Word of God, and the integrity of the Gospel message in its entirety.
In 2006, Ludy began development of the curriculum that is now currently utilized as the foundational message in the Ellerslie semester-long training. To prepare and hone this material, Ludy hosted discipleship trainings in his home for three years with a group of 10-15 students. For years, Ludy spoke in front of thousands, but the transition to a small group proved supremely important in his development as a leader and in his preparation for leading the discipleship training process at Ellerslie. In 2009, when he took the helm at Ellerslie Mission Society, Ludy and his wife had written a combined 18 published books that had sold well over a million copies and been translated into over a dozen languages around the world. The Ludys have continued to write, publishing an additional nine books since launching Ellerslie Discipleship Training in 2009.
Ellerslie Press
2019 – Set Apart: A Passionate Devotion to Jesus Christ (by Leslie Ludy)
2016 – The Fingerprints of Grace (by Eric Ludy)
2016 – It Takes a Gentleman and a Lady (by Eric Ludy)
2016 – The Bold Return of the Dunces (by Eric Ludy)
2016 – Dub’s Dandy Inventions (by Eric Ludy)
2016 – Are These Really My Pants (by Eric Ludy)
2015 – Barracks 28 (by Eric Ludy)
Navpress Publishers
2015 – Set-Apart Woman (by Leslie Ludy)
2014 – Set-Apart Motherhood (by Leslie Ludy)
Harvest House Publishers
2009 – Wrestling Prayer (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
2009 – The Lost Art of True Beauty (by Leslie Ludy)
2008 – Sacred Singleness (by Leslie Ludy)
2008 – Answering the Guy Questions (by Leslie Ludy)
2007 – The Bravehearted Gospel (by Eric Ludy)
2007 – Set-Apart Femininity (by Leslie Ludy)
2006 – A Perfect Wedding (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
Thomas Nelson Publishers
2007 – Meet Mr. Smith (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
2006 – The First 90 Days of Marriage (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
2005 – Teaching True Love (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
Multnomah Publishers
2007 – Authentic Beauty – Study Guide (by Leslie Ludy)
2004 – When God Writes Your Life Story (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
2003 – God’s Gift to Women (by Eric Ludy)
2002 – Authentic Beauty (by Leslie Ludy)
2000 – When Dreams Come True (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
1998 – When God Writes Your Love Story (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
Makarios Publishing
1996 – Romance God’s Way (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
1995 – His Perfect Faithfulness (by Eric and Leslie Ludy)
Eric, The Pastor
Eric Ludy is the senior pastor at the Church at Ellerslie in Windsor, Colorado. He has functioned in this pastoral teaching role since mid-2009. In a Christian world that seems to be quickly veering away from preaching the Word of God, Ludy is a polar extreme. On a typical Sunday morning, Ludy’s sermon notes (made available to the church) are typically over ten pages of text size 10 font, 90% Scripture. Ludy is often both praised and ridiculed for his speaking style. Simply put, he is deeply passionate, and often very loud as a result. Ludy quips that he once used to keep his audiences listening by the sheer force of his sense of humor, and now he does it through shock and awe. “I used to be so likable in my delivery style,” says Ludy, “But now I’m like a freight train rumbling through a small sleepy town early on a Saturday morning.” For a quick taste of Ludy’s thunderous communication style that has garnered him both deep loyalties and deep antipathies amongst his hearers, check out his Daily Thunder Podcast, his Bravehearted Short Films, and his weekly Eric Ludy Sermons.
Eric, The President
Eric Ludy is the president of Ellerslie Mission Society and can be found daily training students in the Gospel life at Ellerslie Discipleship Training and preaching weekly at Ellerslie’s campus church in Windsor, Colorado. His podcast Daily Thunder is streamed live seven days a week from the stage of the chapel on the Ellerslie Campus. Ludy is widely sought after as a forceful advocate for the Gospel, and throughout the calendar year can be found speaking at various venues around the world. Ludy’s passion for rescuing the orphan, evangelizing the unreached, teaching the preeminence and primacy of Jesus Christ, and preaching the authority of the Word of God unabashed and straightforwardly have marked him as both a man to love and a man to hate.
Eric, The Pest
Eric Ludy is one of the Christian leaders of today that people love to hate. And strangely, he doesn’t seem to mind. After being voted homecoming king in both high school and in college, Ludy’s popularity status took a sharp nosedive when he began to strongly preach all-out-givenness to the leadership and control of Jesus Christ. Ludy’s great passion is to see the Body of Christ united and standing shoulder to shoulder for the glory of King Jesus, but ironically, his efforts to bring the Body together on Biblically uncompromising grounds, has led to the greatest assaults against him. Through the years he has been called an extremist, an idiot, a heretic, a cult leader, a satanic priest, a *@%&!, and an uneducated imbecile, but none of these labels have caused him to back off in his pestering work to see the Church of Jesus Christ function as the Church of Jesus Christ. But, if you ever see him with concrete boots at the bottom of the Potomac, at least you will know why.
What Does Eric Ludy Believe?
There are a lot of people that attempt to guess Eric Ludy’s belief system. Some not very accurately. So, instead of waiting for someone to guess correctly, we figured it could be helpful to stick it here.
Hint: It has a lot to do with the majestic person of Jesus Christ and the authoritative Truth of the Word of God!
So, what does Eric Ludy believe?
About the Word of God in Text?
It is known as Scripture.
It is sixty-six books compiled by God Himself, each book supernaturally orchestrated and selected, every paragraph divinely governed in its construction, every phrase purposely chosen, and every word bearing heavenly significance. I believe that the Scriptural collection of canonized text is perfect in its native state, timeless and un-evolving in its substance, and fully authoritative in its position. I believe that Scripture, though aided in its construction by the intellects, personalities, and pens of men, is nonetheless God’s very words. Just as Jesus was wholly man and yet wholly God, so the text of Scripture bears an identical miraculous nature. I believe that the entirety of Scripture is useful for the formation of doctrine and that every doctrine discerned from the Biblical text must prove to be in agreement with the entirety of the sixty-six books and must not be disprovable or undermined by even a single variant reference. I believe the inerrancy of Scripture can be maintained through the process of translation, however, I believe it essential in the process of language translation that individual words in the original language be translated, whenever possible, for individual words in the new language, and that editorial interpretation be avoided with great care. In my training, I discourage the use of idea-for-idea translations amongst my students as primary study texts and oppose the notion that dynamic equivalent and paraphrase renderings of the Biblical text are authoritative representations of God’s unchanging Word. I outright oppose the Emergent notions of our day that challenge the divinity of Scripture and that recast the nature of the Bible as simple narrative. Whereas the Bible certainly includes story, it is much more than a mere testimony of the past, it is an authoritative, governing guide and rule of Kingdom Law for the present and it supernaturally contains a complexity of heavenly Truth that can be trolled only with a humble, contrite, trembling dependence upon the Spirit of Almighty God.
About the Word of God in Person?
His Name is Jesus.
And I stand in concert with the Nicene Creed on the person of Jesus Christ and wholly agree with the historic defense of Athanasius in claiming Jesus to be God “in substance.”
The Nicene Creed states, and I concur:
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.
I assert the Deity of Jesus Christ and do not take lightly the diminishment of any of the above revealed elements of His Person. I believe that Jesus Christ is the quintessential player in universal history, both at the level of nations and at the level of the individual human soul. I believe that the Person of Jesus Christ is preeminent in all matters of life, whether they be theological, philosophical, psychological, historical, political, economical, or societal in purport. I believe that faith in Jesus Christ, with exclusive allowance of Lordship over the human soul, represents the door through which the fullness and essence of True Life can be found. I wholly reject the notion that belief in Jesus Christ can fit into a system of faith that does not give Him sole position of control and command over the human life. I believe that the act of yielding to Christ as Lord necessitates a removal of all other systems of religious thought that contradict and undermine the revealed purposes of the rightful King over all.
About the importance of the Cross?
It’s the Place towards which the Word of God, both in Text and in Person, set their face. I believe all the Old Testament points towards the Cross and all the New Testament flows, like a Living River, from the Cross.
I believe that the Cross is the pivot point in history, representing a correction of the great problem of humanity. It’s more than two pieces of wood and an innocent man hanging needlessly upon them – it is Majesty on High delivering a death blow to the entire army of Hell, the greatest act of heroic love this universe has ever witnessed, the Champion of Heaven absorbing the full punishment of sin and fulfilling perfect justice, and a seemingly helpless Lamb conquering the powers of sin and death and paving the way for a Kingdom take-over of human lives. The Cross represents a brilliance born in the heart and mind of the Almighty, being the perfect enunciation of His nature of Love, Holiness, Justice, Wrath, and Grace, perfectly fulfilling every demand of Messianic authenticity, while at the same time shaming and humiliating the confounded demonic and earthly rebels that unwittingly helped to carry it out. The Cross is both the greatest tragedy and yet the most dramatic victory. It was triumph wrenched from the jaws of apparent defeat, the Son forsaken by the Holy Father allowed to drink to the dregs the wine of God’s wrath and yet simultaneously it’s His affectionate proposal of life and love to His beloved Bride – the ultimate gift of love and redemption. It is Life purchased, Salvation gained, the Host of Hell defeated, and access opened to the long shrouded mystery of godliness. The Cross represents the inauguration of a new covenant, the establishing of a new order – a heavenly invitation to every man, woman, and child to partake of the Body and Blood of God, to receive the very Living Reality of God’s Life within – to exchange their life for God’s Life – to no longer live to themselves but for Christ to live in them.
The Cross is the centerpiece of the Gospel. It’s not for the covering of sin, it’s the heavenly solution for the removal of sin’s presence. It’s more than the forgiveness of transgressions, it’s the channel through which men and women can access the very Life of Jesus Christ, living, moving, and having His being within them, in order to represent God’s very nature, character, purity, and holiness to this world. The Cross is the device that God has used to take the filthy rebels of humanity and make them pure and holy vessels of His presence.
Eric Ludy’s Official Statement of Faith
- I believe the Bible is the inspired and infallible and authoritative Word of God. I believe that the Canon of Scripture has been divinely preserved and that it is in fact the Word of God, and is useful for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Further, the Word of God in text points us to the Word of God in Person, Jesus Christ. Finally, I stand firm upon the two immutable truths of God’s counsel and His oath, in which it is impossible for God to lie. And this I hold as the anchor for my soul (2 Tim. 3:16-17; Jn. 1; Heb. 6:18).
- I believe there is one God, eternally existing in three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Godhead is flawlessly and perfectly immutable.
- I believe in the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal future return to the earth in power and glory to rule over the nations.
- I believe man was created good and upright, but fell from that place of perfection into a condition of spiritual depravity. Thusly, man stands condemned in the light of God’s justice.
- I believe the only means of our being justified and cleansed from our sin, and thusly the eternal penalty of it and its control over our soul, is through repentance and through faith in the precious blood of Christ. And I believe that personal salvation is evidenced in the regeneration of the believing man or woman by the Holy Spirit.
- I believe the Scriptures teach a life of holiness. Sanctification is a separation from that which is evil and a dedication unto God. I believe all believers should earnestly pursue sanctification by walking in obedience to God’s Word. I further believe that the Christian is enabled to live a godly life by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
- I believe that Jesus will return to this earth in order to judge all that which has defied His Lordly position, claim that which was purchased by His blood, and to rule and reign over all His possession for eternity.
Exploring More of Eric Ludy’s Beliefs
If you would be interested in pursuing a greater understanding of Eric Ludy’s faith, doctrine, and teachings, then we would like to introduce you to “the rabbit hole.” Since he has literally hundreds of messages to choose from, here is a list of topics to help direct you in the first steps of your grand adventure in exploring the passion-filled academics of Mr. Eric Ludy.