Staff Testimonies
FFOZ, dedicated to proclaiming the Torah and its way of life, fully centered on Messiah, to today's people of God.
D. Thomas Lancaster
Daniel is FFOZ’s Director of Education and regular contributor to messiah magazine. He is the author of Torah Club Volumes Two, Four and Five, and the FFOZ books, Mystery of the Gospel, Restoration and King of the Jews.
I am a country pastor’s son. The story is that when I was born, I surprised my parents with my gender. They already had three boys and two girls. They were expecting a third girl to balance out the family. Fully anticipating the birth of a daughter, they had picked out the name Sarah Joy for me. When I was born a male child, they were at a loss for what to name me. According to the story, a day or so after I was born, the Lord impressed upon my parents that my name was to be Daniel Thomas. In truth, I have always preferred the Thomas side to the name, because I identify more readily with the pragmatic, doubting disciple Thomas than I do with the mystical, vision-seeing prophet Daniel. In fact, doubt came to be one of the prime motivators in my life and studies, and to some degree, still is. Nevertheless, I am a believer, and have been since the age of four. I grew up in a small, non-denominational, fundamentalist church that in later years became affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America.
My father was only the first in a long series of short-term pastors who came through our tiny rural church, where we were taught the Gospel and generally believed ourselves to be the only outpost of true believers in the vicinity. We lived by the Bible—for the most part. While presenting sermons, our pastors often quipped, “Don’t just take my word for it. Read the Bible yourself.” I did.
As a young teen, I decided to read through the Bible. When I did, I noticed several glaring inconsistencies between the biblical text and church practice and theology. Jesus’ words were particularly unsettling. I began to have a sick feeling in my stomach. My church, which ‘only did what the Bible said,’ did not seem to have a great deal of affinity with actual biblical practice or theology.
Among the discrepancies I noted was the biblical Sabbath. I noticed that the Sabbath was the seventh day, Saturday, and there was nary a mention of a Sunday Sabbath for Christians. Still, I never considered the seventh day as relevant to Christians because, to
me, Sabbath and church were synonymous, and church was always on Sunday. All the same, something was amiss. I felt the clouds of doubt gathering around me.
When I was a teenager touring Israel, we visited Jerusalem’s Yad V’Shem Holocaust museum. It was my first real confrontation with the horror of the Holocaust.
As I looked into the eyes of the Nazis’ victims in the photographs and stared through the photographically reproduced barbed-wire fences, I suddenly realized that I was on the wrong side of the fence. If we Christians were the real people of God, why were the Jews still targeted and hated by the world? Shouldn’t we be the ones on whom the forces of evil bend their energy? Instead, we were the ones dispensing the evil. Something began to stir within me.
My brother Steven, a scholar in Semitic languages and biblical geography, has had a profound influence on me. For a while, he and his wife attended a Seventh Day Baptist congregation and celebrated the Friday evening Sabbath meal in the Jewish tradition. When my parents and I visited my brother and his wife on a Friday evening, they brought in the Sabbath with the traditional lighting of candles, the bread, the wine, the blessings and the prayers of the Sabbath table. I was enamored with the richness of the tradition. My own religious experience, devoid of ritual, seemed to pale in comparison with this simple, eloquent expression of faith that was the Sabbath. Here was something of substance. I saw the Messiah in every ritual. The quiet, the peace and the spiritual essence of the Sabbath filled me with a strange nostalgia I could not explain.
After three years of school, I dropped out of college and out of Christianity to become a famous rock star. I moved to the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area with my rock band and began a new life as a loser. After not being famous for a few years, I met a nice Catholic girl with leanings toward Judaism and married her. When we began to have children, we wondered what religion we were, so we began to explore the options.
My wife and I visited a Messianic Jewish congregation, and we began to learn Torah from a Messianic perspective. We learned about the authentic roots of Christianity. We learned about the Sabbath and the biblical festivals. I began to see Yeshua, the real, biblical Jesus—the Jewish Jesus—and I began to understand Him in His Jewish context. It was eye-opening. It was like reading the Scriptures for the very first time.
The thrill of discovery was exhilarating. At first I assumed that our family and the few people attending the congregation with us were the only ones in the whole world who understood the Scriptures this way. Then we discovered First Fruits of Zion (FFOZ) and realized that we were not alone. The materials of FFOZ were like water in the desert.
Our growing little family struggled with how to honor the Torah. At first, the observances were awkward. Keeping the Sabbath, keeping the festivals—everything from lighting candles on Friday nights to fasting on the Day of Atonement—it all felt a little bit pretentious, as if we were co-opting someone else’s religion, as if we were pretending that we were Jews. But the spirit of Messiah was in it, and the thirst for intimacy with Him overcame our hesitation. After only a few years, the observances and rituals were second nature, and our children grew up without ever knowing a different lifestyle.
Torah study was eye-opening, revolutionary, explosive and thrilling. It was like an antidote to doubt, and it fueled me on to study all the more. My misgivings about the Bible began to vanish. The more I studied the Torah and the Jewishness of Jesus and the early believers, the more the Thomas side of me was confounded.
I began to study Torah in earnest in the context of an Orthodox Jewish community. I immersed myself in the world of traditional Jewish literature. I devoured Torah, Talmud, Midrash and classical Jewish commentary on the Bible. I’ve never felt closer to the Master than when studying Torah in the midst of His people.
Our experience in the Jewish community fueled my passion to bring Torah to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I went back to school and finished my degree with a major in Biblical Literature. I took positions teaching adult Christian education classes in large evangelical churches. Other teaching opportunities opened, and soon I was teaching in churches and Messianic Jewish congregations as many as four to five times a week.
In 1998, I received an e-mail from Boaz Michael inviting me to write for the First Fruits of Zion publication Bikurei Tziyon. A few years later I came onboard full time with the ministry. Now I actually get paid to write and teach about Torah and Messiah. I have the best job in the world. It might even be better than being a famous rock star.
Daniel serves as a congregational leader at Beth Immanuel in Hudson, WI. He resides in Saint Paul, MN, with his wife Maria and their children, Isaac, Gabriel, Simon and Miriam.
