Wayne Craig, Northwest Director for Every Man A Warrior, is shown with his wife Jaymi. (Courtesy photo)
By Steve Bertel
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a two-part article.
We’ve all watched those television shows where carpentry crews take on major home renovation projects, bashing through stucco walls with their sledgehammers, ripping out old linoleum, tearing away decayed shingles, even pulling antiquated wallpaper off the walls. Replacing the old with the new.
That’s the way it was in Wayne Craig’s life.
Only God was the carpenter.
Wayne grew up in rural southern Ada County with his parents, one brother, and two sisters. He admits they were a typical lukewarm Christian family. “My parents were believers, but we went to church only about six or seven times a year – enough for me to understand there was a God out there, and that some guy by the name of Jesus apparently walked around on this Earth a long time ago, did some miracles, died on a cross, and apparently woke up a few days later. So yes, I was checking the box a few Sundays a year so I could ‘identify’ as a Christian.”
Like many kids his age in the area, Wayne attended school in nearby Kuna. That’s where he met Jaymi, the girl who would later become his wife. But they were both quite young; he was a burly sophomore; she was still in junior high.
They were madly in love, but “We decided to not follow God’s perfect design for marriage,” he says. “That was in 1989. Shortly thereafter, we had our first child. I was 18, Jaymi was only 15. So I was married, had a wife and a newborn baby at home, and was working three part-time jobs to support them, even before I graduated high school.”
“Fortunately, even though I was not really following the Lord at that time, He blessed our marriage and protected us through some pretty hard times,” he adds. This year, the couple will be celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary.
The “hard times” were more than the average challenges typically facing a young, newly-married couple. Including his walk with the Lord. Wayne and his father were running an electrical contracting business at the time, the family business his father had started. And Wayne was enjoying life. “I felt the Lord calling me for quite a while. But I dug my feet in. I loved the world. I loved my business. I loved my hobbies. I loved everything materialistic. And I justified working six to seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, to provide for my family. So I didn’t have time for the Lord,” he admits. “But He just kept tugging on my heart. I knew what I needed to do. But I didn’t want to get off that fence; I didn’t want to make that commitment and give my life to Him. I felt I could continue to ride that fence line, so to speak, with one foot on and one foot off.”
His wife had been raised in an LDS home. In fact, many members of her family had followed the Mormon faith for several generations. But then, in 1995, Jaymi walked away from that faith. She later accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior and started attending other churches. “Her courage and strength to walk her own walk and pursue Jesus and the Father had nothing to do with me,” Wayne points out. “It was her own personal journey with God. I was not the spiritual leader of the family back then, as I should have been. Today, I tell people my wife drug me kicking and screaming into church, because she was a believer way before me.”
“God meant men to be the spiritual leaders of their families. And when we’re not, we create a void of sorts,” he goes on. “Looking back, it’s amazing how God will use our wives to grab us men by the ears to get our attention.”
The couple “bounced around” between several churches in the area as Jaymi continued to encourage her husband to follow the Lord. As time went on, Wayne says, “I felt more and more that I had to get myself right with God; I had to go down the right path. Watching Jaymi go through her journey sort of nudged me into deciding to start taking things seriously.”
Wayne finally took things seriously on April 4, 1999, when he gave his heart to the Lord during an altar call at a little country church in Eagle, the same church his parents had attended. It was a special day for Wayne. Times three. “It was Easter. It was my wife’s birthday. And it was the day I told myself, ‘All right. It’s time to get off the fence’. So that’s when I made the decision to go forward.”
But the going-forward experience wasn’t quite what he expected. “There was the pastor and a few men in the front of the church. I got a slap on the back and, even though they were happy for me, they said something like, ‘Here’s your Bible. Now go read it,’” Wayne recalls. That left him a bit empty – and wanting more. “That’s not what I needed. I felt I needed a man to come alongside me to mentor and disciple me.”
Of course, Wayne was unaware at the time that God was already working on that.
“Halfway through reading the Old Testament, I got lost and confused. I didn’t know what was going on,” he recalls. Eventually, “I was back to the ‘old’ me. I had stopped reading my Bible and slipped back into my old ways. But I believe God allowed this so I could understand the desperate need we have in the Body of Christ for mature Christian men to come alongside new believers, to mentor and disciple them. I didn’t have that at the time. So I struggled and, eventually, the world pulled me back.”
He adds, “I believe God could have provided a man to come alongside me. But again, I think He wanted me to go through that experience, so I could understand the incredible need we have within the body of Christ right now for men to step up, dedicate some time, and mentor baby Christians. I didn’t know it at the time, but He was preparing me for where He was going to call me.”
“When some men come forward in altar calls like that, they ‘get it.’ They go all-in for the Lord and get off the fence from that point on. But I didn’t. So the Lord had to hit me upside the head with a bigger two-by-four to help me get the point,” he chuckles.
That two-by-four came in December, 2007, when economies around the world began to decline. And things quickly went from bad to worse. A subprime mortgage crisis soon hit the United States. Housing prices fell, homeowners walked away from their mortgages, and banks – those that hadn’t already closed – were unable to provide loans to businesses.
With the economy in shambles, “Our family’s [electrical contracting] business, that once had more than forty employees, ground to a halt,” he recalls. “As I result, I lost everything. I lost our big beautiful home on ten acres. I lost my new, one-ton diesel truck. I lost all my ‘toys,’ my ATVs …” But, even though Wayne and his family hit rock bottom, “I was still riding the fence, still refusing to go ‘all-in’ for God and fully give my life to Him.”
One day, Wayne told his wife, “I can’t explain it, but I believe God wants me to go to North Dakota for a few years for work.” There was a job opportunity there, a way for him to earn money and put food on the table through the tough times. So he took it. The plan was: Jaymi and their children – they had a son and three daughters by then – would stay behind in Idaho, a plan that would allow their kids to graduate from high school with their friends. The couple figured the arrangement would last about two years. But, even though Wayne came home every so often, the separation from his wife and family became increasingly unbearable.
A year into it, “I hit my knees and cried out to the Lord, ‘I give up! I can’t take this anymore!’ I told Him I would do anything He asked of me; that I would make any change He needed me to make, if only He would bring my family back to me,” he says.
Eventually, Wayne began attending a local church – the Evangelical Bible Church – in the North Dakota community where he lived. There, he met the church’s associate pastor, Ron Dazell, who became the mentor Wayne had so desperately craved. “Ron gave me a whole new perspective; he helped me better understand the Bible,” Wayne points out. “Even to where I felt more open about asking dumb questions.”
The two soon became close friends. So close that “One day, I said to him, ‘I’m so frustrated. I go to bed each night reading my Bible. In fact, I fall asleep reading it. The next morning, I wake up with it on my chest – and I don’t remember anything I read the night before! There must be something out there that can help me dig into God’s Word and retain it.’
“I remember Ron said to me, ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking about starting a new men’s small group study called ‘Every Man A Warrior.’ Would you like to be in the pilot group?’
“I said, ‘Absolutely! I’ll try anything.’”
Every Man A Warrior is a Bible study that helps spiritually-mature men disciple others, especially new Christians. Its four-book study program, written by founder/president Lonnie Berger, teaches men how to walk closer with God, how to build a personal love relationship with Him, and how to conquer the typical daily battles men fight, all while teaching them the biblical foundations of how to be a godly husband and father, how to stay morally pure, how to find victory over sins they gave up trying to fight, and how to succeed in life when they go on to teach the same truths to other men. At the time Wayne joined, the study program was in its infancy; by 2015, men in all fifty states and several countries were using EMAW; in 2017, the ministry joined TransWorld Radio, a worldwide Christian radio network; and by 2019, 80,000 men in sixty countries had been impacted by the EMAW curriculum.
Finally being mentored in his walk with the Lord made for what Wayne describes as “a radical transformation in my life. God used Ron to disciple me through the EMAW curriculum – which built skills and disciplines in my life on how to have a purposeful, lasting love relationship with God. It gave me the biblical template on how to be a godly husband and father. And it forced me to slow down and spend time with God in His Word and in prayer. The work He did in my heart changed me from the inside out.”
Five years after Wayne left Idaho, “God allowed me to be reunited with my bride,” as he puts it, when Jaymi – now an empty-nester – moved to North Dakota to join her husband. Being apart “was the hardest thing we have ever done,” he says. “It was a very, very difficult season of life for Jaymi and me, but we both came through it stronger and more in love with each other as a husband and wife.”
In the fall of 2018, Wayne told Pastor Ron that God had been calling him to “something more,” to serve Him in a greater capacity. “Ron began to help me and stretch me with more and more ministry work, including mentoring me through writing sermons, and practicing and helping to open doors in other areas for me to serve the body of Christ,” Wayne says.
Two years later, the couple sold their home, Wayne made the decision to close the doors of the family business – after celebrating its 40th year, and answer the Lord’s calling to serve full time with the Every Man A Warrior ministry. Later, EMAW founder Lonnie Berger approached him. “He had been watching the fruits of the ministry work for a year or so, and felt it was time for me to come on staff full-time with EMAW. After prayer and speaking with my bride, I accepted his offer.”
“In short, after a season of trials, hard times, and spiritual growth, God restored everything I had lost,” he says. “This was God allowing me to be torn down, so He could rebuild me, prepare me, and then launch me into this new calling and this new season of my life.”
Berger also asked Wayne to move back to Idaho and become the ministry’s Northwest Director for the United States. “The request to move back to Idaho was almost a deal breaker for us,” Wayne admits, “since we had come to love our church family in North Dakota so much and had grown deep roots there.”
But Wayne and Jaymi followed God’s prompting, returned to Idaho, and began developing the EMAW ministry in the Northwest, traveling to churches, assisting pastors, growing the ministry, and strengthening others.
Wayne believes, “Mentorship is lacking in churches today. After men give their lives to Christ, there’s usually no one to come alongside them, and guide them in their walk. Sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, the elderly men in a church used to mentor and disciple the young men. But that’s not done much today. Pastors try to do this, but there are simply not enough hours in the day for them to disciple men like this. Plus, pastors are pulled in so many different directions. That’s where Every Man A Warrior comes in: to come alongside the men and equip them with the tools to mentor others … and on and on down the line.”
Giving credit where credit’s due, he states, “The Lord used the men and women at Evangelical Bible Church in North Dakota to mentor, disciple, and grow both Jaymi and me. Not only have they supported us financially, they launched us spiritually prepared, emotionally prepared, and full of confidence in this calling. To say God used and worked through this precious body of Christ is an understatement. I will be forever grateful for their investment into our lives.”
When he signed up and joined the Every Man A Warrior organization, Wayne knew God was orchestrating his steps. But what he didn’t realize at the time was that God was about to lead him into one of the most deadly and dangerous regions of the world.
Be sure to read all about Wayne’s further experiences in our upcoming May/June issue. If you’re interested in learning more about the Every Man A Warrior men’s ministry, contact Wayne at [email protected].
Steve Bertel is a multi-award-winning professional radio, television, print media, and social media journalist, who retired after a 30-year broadcasting career. Now a busy freelance writer, he recently released his debut suspense novel “Dolphins of an Unjust Sea”, available on both Amazon and Kindle. Steve and his wife of 42 years live in Meridian, Idaho. He can be reached at [email protected]
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