The White Earth Mission Development is a shared position which will help us develop shared ministries in indigenous contexts, and deepen our partnership with one another as Lutherans and Episcopalians in northwestern Minnesota. This is a jointly funded mission between the Northwestern Minnesota Synod of the ELCA and the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota to help support and create leadership development and cross-cultural theological education.

In the face of the massive and intersecting divisions that cut across our common life in this country, we are immensively grateful for the gift of full communion, and the friendship it affords between our traditions. We hope this new venture will deepen those roots of friendship, and help us more faithfully and effectively serve alongside God's beloved at White Earth and beyond.

Pastor Mark Olson is the son of a preacher and a public-school teacher. He’s also a third-generation tree farmer. His personal mission statement is, “If you hold a sapling when Messiah comes, plant the sapling, Then go out and greet the Messiah.” (Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai) Mark spent his college years bouncing between Concordia in Moorhead, and Augsburg in Minneapolis.

This led him to the streets of South Minneapolis and Washington DC, where a call to intercultural ministry began to form. Mark has spent most of his life on the borderlands of the Leech Lake and White Earth reservations—from Park Rapids to Detroit Lakes—from Walker to Bagley. Mark received his doctorate in Congregational Leadership in Mission from Luther Seminary in 2013, with an emphasis on Ojibwe spirituality. Mark’s wife Sara is a Physical Therapist. Sons, Boysen and Palmer are currently studying at the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses of the University of Minnesota.