Welcome to Man Talk, a ministry sponsored by TAWCMM, talking and walking Christian men's ministry, where we're devoted to breaking down the walls of race and denomination, and to point men to their God-assigned roles. Now here's your hosts, Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr. with me this evening, Pastor Ludd and Pastor Ski.
I'll let them each tell you a little bit about themselves here in just a moment. And gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us. It's a pleasure to see you again, Pastor Ski and Pastor Ludd. If we've met, I apologize for not remembering, but it's great to have you with us tonight. Well, it's good to be here. Thank you.
Yes, sir. And I know you listeners, you love that voice as soon as it landed there. So I told him I was listening to his podcast. We need him on our podcast, so we're glad to have him here. Well, Pastor Ludd, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and where you grew up, your family, your children, grandkids. And I'd like for our listeners just to get a little bit of an overview of who you gentlemen are. You don't realize my family is 41 of us now, and one is in heaven.
So how much time do you have? Make that the modified version. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, so I'm a Canadian.
Canuck as we call them. Yeah, and I went to church with my family. It was an ethnic church, so it created difficulties for kids, especially since it was German in First World War times. And but we went to church regularly. My parents were believers. My mother was a godly woman, prayer warrior.
Her prayer life was put to a challenge with my brother and me, and both of us came to Christ as kids, but really had no discipleship. We didn't really have a youth ministry in the church, and so I drifted. I was into athletics. I went to school only because it was expected. I was not a good student. I was preoccupied with sports, and that was my life.
I was gifted in business math. That came naturally, so I got a job very readily after high school and worked as an accountant for a year. But I had made enough of a mess for myself getting diverted from that initial commitment to Christ. So as a senior in high school, I came back to Christ, and a very slow journey. Since I was in a Christian environment, once I started searching, I was able to avoid things, test all things, avoid the bad, and appropriate the good.
I started avoiding the bad, and actually my life was less full at that point than it was before because at least before I had evil to occupy myself. But God finished the repentance aspect of getting me moving in the right direction. Youth for Christ played a significant role in that. I got to know Christian kids, and discipleship started. Back then, the Navigators were really just emerging, and I don't even know how, but I got into the memorizing of Scripture through the Navigators, and that triggered my hunger for the Word of God.
When I did get a job, I wanted to be a witness but didn't know how because of, one, the ethnic background. All of my religious training was in another language, and I really wasn't discipled. I knew that this was a whole new ballgame, and Youth for Christ helped me start moving in that direction, but I finally decided that I would go to Bible school for a year and then go back.
I wasn't planning to go to college or anything else, but I wanted to learn how to articulate my faith and how to share my faith so that my life would count for something. To make a long story short, I wrote ten schools, narrowed down the literature to two schools, and then flipped a coin. The school I chose was in Florida, from Vancouver to Florida, 3,500 miles away.
As an 18-year-old going on 19, I left home and never returned home permanently. I only visited from that point on. But I got involved in Trinity Bible College, which is where Billy Graham got his biblical grounding. After a year, I went to the mission field for the summer, then I went to Moody Bible Institute for three years, going to mission fields in the summer times, and got married after Moody, and went to Wheaton College, another school that Billy Graham went to, and started pastoring between the two years that I was at Wheaton. That was my start.
Ski can give his summary. It's amazing, I love to hear the stories of people's faith journeys, and it's a question I ask believers because the Holy Spirit works in strange ways. I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, and my parents were strong Catholics, and we were saying the rosary just about every night of the week. I was an altar boy, but the priest that was involved in the church, my family played football, college football.
That was an attraction to me. I always had a dream of playing college football, and so I said, this guy likes football. At the age of 14, I sensed a calling to say I want to become a Catholic priest. There was the preparatory seminaries for high schoolers in college, and I was the oldest in a family of what turned out to be six. So they gave up their oldest son. I had to give up my football and went away to this old boy's school and stayed in that system until the third year of college. I said celibacy isn't for me, Lord.
We haven't really looked at the Bible. I was right in the middle of Vietnam going on. My father was a veteran of World War II and my uncle. So I said, well, I'll join the military and get my life sorted out. The Marines had a two-year program, volunteer to go to Knob. It was in November, and I came home. I said, Mom, Dad, I'm going to the Marines in January.
So I go from a white collar in November to a short haircut in January. But I went to San Diego, so I'm a Hollywood Marine, as they say, and discovered a whole new climate. So that was a two-year commitment, and I served there in Da Nang, which is the northern part. My job was typing orders on steno things, and then we'd go relieve other units on the hilltops. So that was my exposure to any kind of combat. I never had to shoot at anybody, but we got shot at during the Tet Offensive and that kind of a thing. Came back and enrolled in college to finish up.
I got a degree in sociology and finance. And having come from a Catholic school, two years in the Marines, Vietnam, now suddenly I was like a bull in a calf pasture. So it was great, but God led me to my wife playing football, and we said we courted on the football field, and she caught all my passes. So that was in October. In May, I left.
I don't know if this is going to go on. And we corresponded by letter and phone until September. I flew her out, and there was still a spark there, and so we continued a phone call.
And I recommend this kind of a courting thing. And then in December, I flew her out to San Diego again, and she said yes to my proposal. And then I didn't see her again until three days before I got married.
So from December to July, we had phone call only. And I recommend that kind of a courtship. And now 53 years later, we are still, and we have two children, and we adopted our daughter who lives here. But we pursued the gospel in our married life because I grew up Catholic, and she grew up in the Protestant.
She had a young life experience also. And then I was pursuing money in the business world. I wanted to get money, but God kept giving me pink slips until at the age of 40, I finally surrendered with a wife and three kids and went to seminary in Texas where it was a warm climate. It was in a Presbyterian church, and the kids called it a cemetery because it really was a cemetery. We were only one of four families that went to church on Sunday, believe it or not. And then I got a call to this small church in Circleville, New York, which is near West Point. And that church started in 1841 against slavery, but it was only every 30 years they called a pastor. And so I hit that cycle, and they were usually second career ex-military young families.
And so that was my first and only call, and I served there for 24 years. Ironically, there's Civil War graves in that cemetery from soldiers that died at the Salisbury, North Carolina prison. And that's where my wife and I are going to be buried. So our sons now have a sports ministry.
They hold time called 12th Rock. And they had to tear down, they got 14 acres, they had to tear down two big dairy barns. So I grew up on a farm, I knew how to do that, construction and all that kind of stuff. And so that's part of their calling and a family legacy that we're leaving.
Because sports and music are the funnels to get people to think about Jesus. And so they are, I'm still involved in that, and I have a dream of, I ran at the A&T track at 75, won my age group in the 400, and then got beat by an 80-year-old retired pastor by three seconds. My goodness, that's a pretty big stretch of 400. And then I got the shot put, I'm going to throw the shot put in a Masters event in August of at our son's property in my age group.
And so God continues to bless me with the health and that avenue of sports. So maybe going ahead of it, my theme right now is, maybe you've heard the stories of young elephants getting moved to an area and then going crazy and wild in Africa. And then they had to bring some old bull elephants over there to straighten them out.
And it was a matter of only weeks, and they had their lives back together. And the other picture is of the bull buffalos used to circle around their young when there was danger. And I'm thinking that's what God is calling the church to do, a bunch of old buffalos and elephants getting together and harnessing men and saying, we need to protect our children and our youth because they are the target of the enemy. And I got a millstone that I found in somebody's yard that was next to the church building that we built, and I put that at the foot of the cross. That's the passion that we need to protect our youth, and it'd be better for a millstone to be tied around your neck than to mislead one of my children. And so I'm just passionate, and our sons are passionate, that every young man and every young woman ought to be protected by the Holy Spirit and by the efforts of other men in their lives. Amen, Pastor Ski. You know, that leads into a great question for both of you, and I love your passion, Pastor Ski, and mine is for men, as you know, and Pastor Ludd, you know now, but one of the things about, and the reason I'm so passionate about men is because that's where it all began.
God created Adam first, right? And then it was all put on his shoulders to be responsible caregiver, caretaker, protect the relationship with God, protect the relationship with his wife, and then the enemy got in the middle of all that and blew it all up, and it continues through this day. And what I've seen in this culture, and it's funny, Pastor Ludd, you were talking about not having that disciple or somebody to help you walk through that journey, and for many of you as the listening audience, I'm sure you're dealing with the same thing. You maybe didn't grow up in a Christian home, you didn't grow up with a dad that loved the Lord, and you can't figure out where you're supposed to be.
Well, the best thing for you to do is get a mentor and a brother to walk alongside of you. No matter what age you are, he can come alongside and bring you through whatever you haven't learned, and I was one of those guys, and that's why my passion is because we have this picture, and I'll have to get you a copy of it. I don't know, Pastor Ski, if we give it to you, but it's called The Sideline Dad.
It's on our website, talcum.com, www.tawcmm.com. You can see that, you can download it there, but the visual is that the dad is on the sidelines of a football field with his muscular-built man with his arms laying on top of the bench. His wife is on the field with the Bible. Behind the wife are three children, dressed in, one's kind of got an armor suit on, it's the young man, and then there's the little girl who's kind of got a makeshift body of armor, and then the little boy there, the younger boy, is looking back at his father, and there's one of two questions that's being postured from that view is, Dad, can I be like you, or Dad, why aren't you in the fight? And so I was that guy up until 2005, and so my passion is just that, that men have got to get off the sidelines, and just like you said, we've got to protect our children, which leads us into the next question. Have you seen, for both of you pastors, have you seen a transition from the responsibility, because you're both going to be old enough to have seen several generational changes, as like I have, but not maybe as many as you have, but have you seen a transition from the responsibility of men, what it was 50 years ago, to what it is today, and if so, what does that look like, and what would be your advice to the listening audience?
I'll start with you, Pastor Ludd. Well, it starts really in the home, and I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a grandfather, and a great-grandfather, a total of 42, but my wife has already gone home to be with the Lord, so 41. We had four children, two guys and two gals, and fortunately they came to the Lord early in life, and the boys were a challenge, but never really drifted far from walking with the Lord, and the girls were straight shooters. Fortunately, they married believers, and those believers came from Christian homes, so the more foundational structure you can encourage people to develop and maintain and encourage, the stronger the future generations become, and so I now have 12 grandchildren, seven of them are married, and they're all married to believers, and as far as I know, all of them came from believing families, so the groundwork is there, and frankly they're doing an amazing job with their children, I have 13 great-grandchildren now, and one on the way, and all of them, as far as I know, are believers, except the little ones, covered by the grace of God, are in an environment where they're getting training, so that four of our great-grandchildren have professed faith, three of them have been baptized, and the other ones are in an environment where they're encouraged to know the Lord. So I would say that in one sense, I am seeing within the big church, an element in the church that is moving in a very constructive and positive fashion, and including young people, but there is such a vast number of people who are in sort of no man's land, they're either turned totally off from God, and wrapped in a worldview that leaves God out, and that leads to disaster. On the surface they might be very successful, but we know that they're heading down the broad road, and it leads to destruction, eternal destruction, and so there is a challenge for us to not only know the gospel and the Savior in an intimate fashion, but pass that on to the next generation.
So within the family, that's the start. Then the church, because the church is made up of people who are in all different ranges of experience. Some came to Christ later on in life, others grew up in the church, and the last guy I baptized age-wise was 88 years old. Interestingly, he grew up in the church, became an alcoholic. His father actually was a bishop in the church, but never knew Christ personally. This successful businessman in a nursing home, and a woman that I happen to know, she and her husband, her husband died, she befriended him as a friend in the nursing home, and took him to church, and set up an appointment for me to meet him, and I had the joy not only of leading him to Christ through the ministry of the church and personally, but also baptizing him. But that's rare to get people to come to Christ once they're at that age.
So starting as early as you can, and then continuing to work diligently at discipling them so that they can pass on what you have taught them, and they in turn can pass it on to the next generation. It's the multiplication of discipleship that really is at the heart of what the church needs. That's its strength, and that's its key to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, not only in word, but in deed. Amen.
That's good. So as we get ready to close this session one out, one last, or just to kind of come back to one question, Pastor Ludd, is what have in your mind, and Pastor Gee, you can chime in as well, what has been the transition in the view of the man's role in the church and in the home from early years, say from the 1960s to today? Have you seen a change, I guess would be the thing, and if so, what has been that change? In my own personal ministry, I focused on men, and so we always had a fairly good contingent of men in the life of the church, and I think that became one of the strengths in the life of the church, but it takes time. I used to meet with men for breakfast on a fairly regular basis. We had two times a week a breakfast with a small group of guys at five in the morning, and then again at six, a different group, so I wasn't at home. But I made it very clear that I was not going to allow myself to get so wrapped up in ministry to others that I lose the ministry at home, and so by the grace of God, he has enabled me to be able to do that.
My wife never went out on another job, but she was full-time at home, and that helped bring that together. Well, General, we're coming up close on our first session, but when we come back to session two, Pastor Skeel, I'd like to get your input on that as well. Listening to August, we thank you for joining us. Pastor Ludd, it's been great to have this first session with you.
Folks, we'll have at least one more, maybe two more that will be on the pipeline for you to listen to as we continue this conversation. Pastor Ludd, would you like to close us in prayer for our listening audience and for us here as a group? Father, we thank you that the Word of God is powerful, that experiences that you have created in our lives are dynamic as we share those experiences and the Word of God, and I pray that this podcast might encourage people to get into the Word of God, share it with each other, and then share it by the way in which they live, as well as in Word, out in the world in which we live. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Pastor Ludd, Pastor Skeel, thank you so much. You're welcome. Have a great day.
