Study centers succeed or fail on their leadership. Lantern House is built on a partnership forged over decades of shared ministry across six continents.
Dan and Sam met in 2017 at an Outdoorsmen's Retreat in rural North Dakota. A mentoring friendship became a ministry partnership that has since spanned Cairo, Addis Ababa, Fiji, Paris, Beijing, and the campus of the University of Kansas. They have published over 100 episodes of the Preach and Persuade Podcast together. Lantern House is, in many ways, the culmination of everything that partnership has been building toward.
Dan has lived and ministered in Lawrence since 1995 — nearly thirty years at the intersection of community, university, and local church. He is not parachuting in with a plan. He is finally building the house he has been furnishing for thirty years. He came to faith as a university student in the 1980s through an honest question meeting an honest answer in the context of community — and that experience became the template for his entire ministry. Since 1987, he has been in full-time evangelistic ministry, and with Ambassadors for Christ International since 1998, training church leaders globally in evangelism, church planting, and apologetics. He and his wife, Tina, have been married over 40 years, raised five children, and have 8 grandchildren. Their home — and Lantern House — is known for what the L'Abri tradition calls "the demonstration of Christian community": truth, beauty, and delightful hospitality.
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Sam brings a rare synthesis: the rigorous academic formation of a systematic theologian and the fire of an experienced evangelist. Born and raised in rural west-central Minnesota, he holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where his dissertation — A Theology of Kingdom Law: A Retrieval of Thomistic Law for Progressive Dispensationalism — demonstrates his commitment to serious, integrative scholarship.He has served as an evangelist with Ambassadors for Christ International for eight years, ministering across six continents and training church leaders representing over 20 countries. Much of this work was done alongside Dan Rudman — a partnership that now finds its institutional home at Lantern House.Sam and his wife Kate have one son, Boaz. His research interests include theologies of law, political theology, metaphysical realism, beauty, and the theology and practice of evangelism.
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