Edward's own story is but one of millions testifying to God's faithful, gracious and often-surprising guidance. The oldest grandson of African missionaries on his mother's side and poor Southern sharecroppers on his father's, Edward was born six weeks premature in a rural Alabama clinic in 1944. Unable to take nourishment, he faced death until God spared his life in answer to his parents' fervent prayers. Edward grew up in Athens, Ala., where he attended Athens Bible School for 12 years, began preaching at age 16 and sometimes picked cotton to buy winter clothes.

After graduating high school in 1962, he began three years of textual Bible study at Florida (Christian) College under the late Prof. Homer Hailey. There he also met Sara Faye Locke of Franklin, Tenn., now his wife of 41 years. After earning two degrees in biblical languages from Abilene Christian University, Edward attended Covenant and Eden theological seminaries, both in St. Louis, Mo., where he preached from 1968-1972 and Sara Faye, a Peabody/Vanderbilt graduate, taught Senior English at Kirkwood High School.

Wilderness years

In 1972, Edward's father, Bennie Lee Fudge, died suddenly from pneumonia at age 57. Edward (age 28) and Sara Faye (age 27) returned to Alabama to help his mother, Sybil (Short), with the family's CEI Publishing Company until she sold the company and returned to Africa to help care for her elderly parents. For a decade, now figuratively remembered as "the wilderness years," Edward and Sara Faye underwent a crash course in learning to depend on God for everything as, one by one, old securities crumbled until only God remained. They also saw first-hand God's faithfulness and provision for those who trust in him.

During this period, a sectarian cabal secretly bought the formerly-family publishing business. On July 10, 1975, the day they took control, they terminated Edward after he refused to change his teaching of salvation by grace through faith rather than through doctrinal precision, rule-keeping or church affiliation. About the same time, Edward was dismissed from the country church where he was preaching after he "suggested that the Baptists and Methodists might also go to heaven" and had recently called on a visiting Black brother to pray. Meanwhile, two legalistic debaters from other states arrived to denounce Edward by name in churches throughout his home county, flamboyantly charging that his teaching on grace had "chopped the anchors that hold the ship of Zion."

Through it all God provided the family's actual needs--for a year in strikingly extraordinary ways, then in 1976 through a $7-per-hour typesetter job for Edward in a printshop. The same year the Fudges and some other friends started a nondenominational church in a renovated barn. (These were the circumstances surrounding the researching and writing of The Fire That Consumes, another story of grace and providence all its own.) Edward served the "barn church" as unofficial and unpaid pastor until 1982, when he was hired as founding editor of The Good Newspaper, an interdenominational Christian newspaper to be published in Houston, Texas.

Houston and a new career

When The Good Newspaper died in 1985 in a sagging Houston economy, God prompted and then providentially arranged for Edward to enter law school at age 40, something he had never planned or even considered. After 42 months of working days and attending law classes at night, Edward received a doctorate in Jurisprudence in 1988 from the University of Houston College of Law, then practiced with the downtown firm of Jenkens & Gilchrist and the westside suburban firm of Simmons, Fletcher & Fudge.

In September 1997, Edward joined the Lanier Law Firm, whose owner, Mark Lanier, generously encourages Edward's multifaceted ministry priorities while he now practices as an attorney "Of Counsel" with the firm. On May 14, 2008, Edward begins his third decade in the practice of law, in which he enjoys the "AV" Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Rating signifying the highest level of professsional and ethical competence.

God has opened doors

After they fired Edward in July 1975, his adversaries boasted that they had driven him underground. God missed their announcement, however, and opened doors for him to minister in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Adventist, Episcopal and nondenominational churches as well as in Independent Christian Churches and numerous varieties of Churches of Christ.

Edward's books have been published by Baker, InterVarsity Press, Paternoster and ACU Press/Leafwood Publishing among others. His 500-page scholarly work, The Fire That Consumes, was an Alternate Selection of the Evangelical Book Club. Edward has been privileged to lecture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary and other institutions of higher learning throughout the USA, Canada and New Zealand. His articles have appeared in Christianity Today, Mission, Anglican Digest, Verdict, Guideposts, Moody Monthly, Review of Books & Religion, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and other periodicals.

Since 1996, Edward has written gracEmail, an internet column for subscribers around the world, and has taught and counseled thousands of others via email and through his website.

Involvement at Bering

Edward and Sara Faye joined the Bering Drive Church of Christ in 1982 with their two small children, Melanie (now Mrs. Michael Simpson and worship minister/children's minister at Bering) and Jeremy (now an immigration attorney in Dallas who with wife Kristy and two daughters are part of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship in Carrollton).

Since 1982, Edward has served Bering Drive Church as a teacher, elder (for 19 years) and occasional substitute preacher. Sara Faye serves on the praise team, as a leader and active participant in WBC and, since 1983, as director of the Children's Library. The Fudges have four grandchildren, Julia and Zeke in Houston, and Brynna and Addy in Dallas. For all these reasons and for many more, both Edward and Sara Faye understandably, cheerfully and constantly give God hearty thanks and praise.