The Code of the Righteous Warrior: 10 Laws of Moral Manhood for an Uncertain World - Hardcover

Waller, Rev. Alyn E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501177184 ISBN 13: 9781501177187

Publisher: Howard Books, 2019

Synopsis

T.D. Jakes’ He-Motions meets The Art of War in this accessible guidebook to help today’s man navigate and thrive in these unpredictable times.

Rev. Dr. Alyn E. Waller, pastor of the mega-church Enon Tabernacle, shares wisdom from his ministry and longtime martial arts experience to inspire and offer moral guidance to navigate the complex challenges today’s men face in daily life.

Where do I fit in the job market and will I ever feel financially secure? How can I lead my family without being a chauvinist or blocking my partner from living fully and expressing her gifts? How do I deal with the fact that my partner makes more money—or has a better job, or owns the home we live in, or is more educated—than I am?

These are but a few of the questions that Waller has heard over and over again as he’s counseled thousands of men, many of whom seek a new set of skills to thrive in modern society. Dramatic shifts in our nation’s cultural, economic, social, and political landscape have upended their lives, leaving them feeling betrayed and lost.

In this eye-opening and inspirational book, Waller draws from his Christian teachings and the lessons he’s learned from martial arts and extreme adventures to offer men innovative strategies to help them fight today’s challenges in ways that affirm their manhood. He offers ten crucial and accessible life tenets such as: prioritize the immediate threat then handle first things first; conserve your resources; and you can survive fear and pain. Code of the Righteous Warrior empowers us to live our best life and rise above any difficulties we may face.

About this title

About the Author

Rev. Dr. Alyn E. Waller is the senior pastor of Enon Tabernacle Church in Philadelphia, the largest congregation in the city. He is an alumnus of Palmer Theological Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ohio University. In addition to being a martial arts expert, Rev. Dr. Waller is a former member of the Army National Guard. He is married to Ellyn Jo Waller, Ed.D., who is an educator, anti-human trafficking expert, and activist. They have two adult daughters, Morgan and Eryka.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Code of the Righteous Warrior Introduction

I SAW THE movement out of the corner of my eye. A guy getting out of a car that I hadn’t noticed. What is a car doing in the desert? And who is that? Suddenly, not just one, but two, three, four, five men were running toward me through the darkness, shouting. I stopped jogging, my vision tightly tunneling around them.

What the . . . ?

“You probably thought that you’d made it, didn’t you?” one of them yelled. “Well, it ain’t over yet!”

Shoot!

I may be a pastor but I wasn’t thinking about pacifism as I fought off my attackers—experts in Krav Maga, the martial art practiced by the Israeli Defense Forces—in the darkness of the Negev Desert. I was taking my test to become a Level 8 Instructor, the level that tests your ability to endure extreme exhaustion and pain. The test required me to stay awake for sixty hours straight, braving all sorts of endurance tests—endless push-ups under the one-hundred-degree sun, running up and down dunes carrying thirty-pound sandbags, doing countless sit-ups along the shore of the Mediterranean with the surf crashing over my face. I was participating along with five other Kravists, as we are called. (Krav maga means “contact combat.”) Now I was being jumped at three a.m. at the end of a seven-kilometer run.

The first attacker tried to punch me in the gut. My arms flew up and blocked him. I pummeled his torso, then I pushed him around to shield myself from the other attackers as he rained blows into my rib cage.

“OOOOF!”

I ducked an elbow but took a kick to my thigh as one tried to take my legs out from under me.

“We’re taking you down!”

Over two and a half days of excruciating pain, I’d been deprived of sleep and permitted to eat only one orange, three dates, two almonds, and a couple of figs. It would have been easy to allow the expletives and racial slurs they threw at me along the way to bait me into losing my composure. But I knew not to think about them or the misery; I could not quit. So I called on one of my favorite passages of scripture: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

More than an hour earlier, Moni Aziks—a former commando with the Israeli Special Forces who had later founded the self-defense system Commando Krav Maga—had started a group of us on our run, ten to fifteen minutes apart. Back home and under normal conditions, I ran a nine-minute mile. This wasn’t normal. I could barely lift my legs and my lungs were on fire. My chest, my arms, my quads, my calves, the soles of my feet—everything burned.

Every hundred meters or so I’d reach one of the glow sticks Moni had placed along the trail, and each time I dragged myself to the top of yet another sand dune, I could see another glow stick glimmering.

Do not quit.

That was about the only thought I’d allowed myself.

I’d known from enduring previous CKM tests that any thought of my wife, Ellyn; daughters, Morgan or Eryka; food; or any other creature comfort might make my mind wander. Give the Devil a foothold. Make me return to Philadelphia short of the goal it had taken almost ten years of training to achieve. Something important about my manhood depended upon my ability to complete this test. I was a successful pastor, but had also made some big mistakes during my life. Some that still haunt me. I needed this.

Don’t quit.

I slogged up yet another sand dune, then I saw Moni standing with his arms folded over his chest.

Hallelujah! You’re almost there!

I was on the verge of meeting a goal I’d set for myself when I was forty years old and overweight and had vowed to get my body back.

Don’t quit.

I was only about fifty yards from Moni when the car had come into view and the guys had jumped out.

Unexpectedly engaged in the fight of my life, I had no time to think “He’s swinging, let me put up my hand”; I relied on my body to do instinctively what I’d trained it to do. My hands went up in time to block the blows without my thinking or directing them to do so. I’d reached the point Bruce Lee once described as “I don’t hit; it hits itself.”

As another attacker came at me, I used the first guy as my shield and kicked my assailant’s legs out from under him.

Don’t quit.

Suddenly, my pants were down around my ankles and I couldn’t move my feet!

Uh-oh!

Then someone threw sand in my face. As I blinked and tried to spit it out of my mouth, a freight train slammed into my gut.

“OOOOF!”

My hand reached for my belt buckle and I pulled my belt free and began to swing it like Okinawan nunchucks. I heard the leather whistle through the air, and saw it slice one attacker’s face.

“You punk!”

I swung the lash again, this time backing two of them up.

A thought arose: This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m doing it—I can do this!

But there was no time to dwell on it. Fingers closed around my neck from behind.

Don’t let him choke you out!

I clenched my teeth into his arm as hard as I could.

“AAAARGH!” he yelled as my bite penetrated his protective arm pads.

His hands loosened around my neck.

Then Moni’s voice: “Okay, stop. That’s enough!”

I’d done it!
No Longer Running

I have been in ministry for more than thirty years. I hold both a master’s degree and a doctorate. But I also like to fight. The truth be told, I love to fight. I really, really love to fight! In fact, I have been engaging in fights of one form or another since my mother signed me up for judo when I was eight years old and got me a G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip. I know, this may not make sense to you. If you’re like most people, you have been raised to see ministers as mild-mannered, even weak—the kind of guys who turn the other cheek. So it’s probably hard to imagine a man of the cloth who also likes to throw and take blows. But I do and I stand unabashedly in that truth about myself. Perhaps knowing a little bit about my background will help you understand.

I grew up outside of Cleveland, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the son of a prominent minister. From my earliest recollections, when I was three or four until I was in the fifth grade, I was always the shortest boy in the class, and thin. You could have called me shy, timid, or something politically incorrect, but the truth of the matter is, despite my father’s position, there were ways in which my life was rough. Among them, Derrick, Michael, Mark, and Jeff bullied me, and when people pick on you, you don’t soon forget. I was afraid of them, and I was scared a lot. Until I started fifth grade, that is.

You may have seen the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, starring Will Smith, which was popular back in the early nineties. That was my life in a nutshell, and I would have been Carlton, not the Fresh Prince. But in the fifth grade, my cousin Lonnie relocated to Cleveland from Philadelphia. Lonnie was “West Philadelphia born and raised,” just like the Fresh Prince. He, too, had gotten in trouble, and Aunt Willa Mae wanted him out of their neighborhood.

But as soon as Cousin Lonnie showed up in the CLE, my life got a whole lot better. Lonnie was five years older than me and he promised that he would have my back. Then he “handled” Derrick, Michael, Mark, and Jeff; they didn’t bother me anymore. Lonnie taught me how to protect myself: He took me into the garage and taught me how to fight. To my surprise, I kind of liked fighting. Before long, I was able to hold my own and dish out “a two-piece and a biscuit” whenever the situation required it. Knowing how to protect myself changed something inside of me. I was no longer scared, no longer always running. A few years after that I discovered wrestling, and I was good at it; and over time I became very accomplished. Finally, I could “handle myself” when it came to the aggression I experienced from other males.

Then one day Lonnie handed down to me an Army shirt with cut-off sleeves and Bruce Lee spray-painted on the back that one of his uncles who had served in Vietnam had brought back and given to him. He might as well have awarded me a black belt; when I wore it you couldn’t tell me anything. The movie Enter the Dragon had just come out and Bruce Lee was its star. After that came David Carradine and Kung Fu. Everyone was into karate. Martial arts became my world.

Fast forward to my freshman year in college. I got distracted by parties and booze and quit the wrestling team. I didn’t know it then, but I was born with a gene that predisposes me to alcoholism, a battle I’d fight for the rest of my life. To help pay for school I enlisted in the National Guard, and for six years served as a weekend warrior as a 19 Delta Calvary Scout, part of the Emergency Response Team. It was there that I learned military values, as well as how to box and handle a weapon. I received my call into the ministry while I was in the Guard. During my final year, I became a chaplain’s assistant. In 1994, several years after graduating from seminary and after pastoring the First Baptist Church in Donora, Pennsylvania, God presented me with the opportunity to become the senior pastor at Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Unbeknownst to me, I was arriving during what would become known as the mega-church movement. Our congregation grew from several hundred to more than fifteen thousand members.

It was a tremendously fun and exciting time; the work was also extremely demanding. I struggled to balance my family life and our rapidly growing ministry with self-care. My blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight began to creep up; I started to feel weird. After being so physically active and fit during my youth, I became the classic middle-aged man struggling with his weight. During my late thirties, I finally started going to the gym, where I faced the sobering reality that, in addition to gaining around thirty pounds, I’d lost a tremendous amount of strength, flexibility, and fitness. Working out was a struggle. Not only that, the more I fought to regain what I’d lost, the more I felt haunted by what I’d left on the table. I’d departed for college with the intention of wrestling and excelling academically. Truth be told, I had done neither. I was a fair student at best until I attended seminary. What would my life have been like if I had been a scholar during my undergraduate years? What would my life have been like if I hadn’t thrown in the towel on the wrestling team? How good could I have become? Could I have made it to the Pan-Am Games or the Olympics? Regrets started eating away at me.

During this time, I learned that an older member of our church, Hamilton Robinson, was an expert in Naphtali, a martial art with a Christian overlay that had originated among the Berber people of North Africa. I knew that I needed to work toward a goal. I also wanted to be held accountable. Fortunately, Master Robinson was at a point in his life where he was looking to share what he knew with younger men. A small group of guys who attended the church and loved fitness and martial arts started training intensively under him several times a week. Everyone’s health improved as we took better care of ourselves. Along the way, our band of brothers, as we’d begun to call ourselves—Leroy, Jerry, Jerome, Mark, Rich, and Vernell—promised each other that we would stay fit and practice martial arts for the rest of our lives. We joked that we would become like SEAL Team Six, forty-year-old style. I started telling the guys that when I turned fifty, I wanted to be like Jason Bourne, the CIA assassin in the Bourne spy-thriller movie series. I was laughing as I said it, but from a self-defense standpoint, I really wasn’t kidding. I reimmersed myself in the martial arts, earning an advanced ranking in four: CKM, American Kenpo karate, Muay Thai, and Naphtali. I’ve also picked wrestling back up. Individually, we began to set goals to really challenge ourselves, then we held each other to them. We have trained together to run in the Penn Relays, the world’s largest track-and-field competition, as well as participated in endurance events like the Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, and GORUCK Challenge. We’ve also engaged in extreme adventures—from a Navy SEALs BUD/S experience in North Carolina, to Muay Thai training in Thailand, to Greg Jackson’s MMA training in New Mexico, to a survivalist adventure in the Amazon. I do something extreme at least once a year.

I realize that these are not activities you’d normally associate with a minister; however, they help me to remove myself from the strange world of ministry, where people often defer to me to an extent that makes me extremely uncomfortable. Instead, experiences like these allow me to connect with my inner “man’s man” and experience a lot of variety and adventure. They equip me with skills I need in other areas of life: in my marriage and in my relationships with my adult daughters; during daily life as an African-American man, as I minister to people on the best and worst days of their lives; and as I serve God in various ways in Philadelphia, around the nation, and, increasingly, as I travel the world. They also push me past my limitations and give me the chance to live the scripture: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

As I engaged in these activities and martial arts practices, I found myself becoming fascinated by the lives of warriors in different cultures, and began to study them. This caused me to think seriously about manhood—particularly in the years around the recession, as I spoke with so many men who had been shaken to their core and challenged to call upon every weapon they possessed to protect themselves and their loved ones—and not always successfully. The experiences have also allowed me to talk about difficult topics with a wide variety of men, often because these contexts allow men to put their guard down. For example, in my martial arts life, during extreme adventures, and in my work as a chaplain for the police and FBI, I have spoken with many White men about their lives and concerns—from fears of job loss and the demographic change taking place in the United States, to a perceived loss of status as men, to the typical family struggles, to the opioid crisis, to school shootings, and so on. Of course, I was already well aware of the trials that many Black males experience, as they have experienced both economic challenges and society’s racism, being “last hired and first fired,” as well as daily struggles to participate in the American Dream, the police brutality being caught on cell phone videos, and in inner-city contexts, underfunded schools and gun violence. I interact frequently with Philadelphia’s Islamic community as well as with rabbis and religious leaders of other faiths and have learned a bit about their concerns. Over the past several years, I have also traveled the world. I was once invited to preach in Korea, where I learned more about that nation as well as a bit about the struggles that Korean Americans and other Asian Americans face. Our own church missionary activities and my leadership of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society helped me to connect the dots between men’s experiences in the United States and all over the world, as I’ve traveled to places as varied as Mexico, Italy, Israel and Palestine, South Africa, Kenya, India, and be...

About this edition

• Publisher: Howard Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1501177184
• ISBN 13: 9781501177187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320