The road I’m asking you to walk, I’ve walked myself.

Dr. Dan Lancaster — pastor, missionary, and the author of more than forty books.

I didn’t start as a published author. I’m not sure I ever thought I could really do it.

I planted three churches in small-town, working-class, and suburban America — the kind of places where ministry is mostly showing up again and again, long after the excitement wears off. Then God moved my family to the other side of the world. For twelve years I served as a missionary in Myanmar and Thailand, walking beside national pastors as they planted hundreds of churches in places where that work can cost a person everything.

Those years cost us, too. In 2016, my wife Holli went home to be with the Lord after a brave fight with ovarian cancer. Grief rewrote me. Some of the truest books I’ve written were born in that valley — and I think they reach people because they were written from inside the sorrow, not from a safe distance above it.

After the field, I served as an assistant vice president at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. After several years, I went back into mission work coaching national leaders globally by video and creating resources for the poor, persecuted, and forgotten.

The first books I wrote were training manuals for the missions field — translated into 26 languages. But I had no idea how to get them published. No agent, no publisher, no map. So I learned the slow way — one mistake at a time. How to write a book people can really use. How to design a cover, set the pages, put it on Amazon, and help the right readers find it. Then I did it again. And again. More than forty titles followed, several of them bestsellers, and today they reach readers in Spanish, German, Portuguese, and languages I never learned to speak. I gathered all of it under one roof — my own publishing house, Lightkeeper Books.

I tell you this for one reason. The distance from “I have a book in me” to “it’s finished and in someone’s hands” is real, and I have walked every step of it. God carried me the whole way. Now I’d be honored to walk it with you.

The short version

• Pastor — three church plants, with a doctorate behind the warmth (BA in Greek, Baylor · MDiv · PhD, Church History & Missions).
• Missionary — twelve years in Myanmar and Thailand; now a global missions coach, working with national pastors via video calls and international trips.
• Author — more than forty books, several bestsellers, in multiple languages; founder of Lightkeeper Books.