Mark S. Hanson (December 2, 1946 - ) is the third, and current, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Rev. Mark S. Hanson was born in Minneapolis Minnesota on 2 December 1946. He was raised in a Lutheran family in Minnesota. His father was a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church . Hanson graduated from Minnehaha Academy in 1964, and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Augsburg College in 1968. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at Union Theological Seminary from 1968 to 1969, where he received a Master of Divinity degree in 1972, and attended Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1973 to 1974. He was a Merrill Fellow at Harvard University Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1979.