Welcome to a blog I’ve started to collect and share thoughts I’ve been having about living out God’s mission in the Driftless region of Southwest Wisconsin. In this blog, I hope to think about living as God’s active mission partners. (Note that since I wrote this entry, the name of the blog and its focus have changed…)

My first audience for this blog is the people of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Viroqua, Wisconsin. Others are welcome to listen in. Good Shepherd is a church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is a congregation that needs to figure out its mission – it’s reason for being the church.

I chose the name Driftless, Not Aimless for this blog for two reasons. I chose it because it communicates where we live. The Driftless Region is the context within which our Church. I also chose this name because it describes our determination to be purposeful. A church with a healthy sense of mission has direction and vitality. It is not adrift. It has direction.

I come to the task of writing this blog with some central convictions and points of view: I begin with the assumption that God is active in this world through Jesus Christ – that God’s greatest hope is that God’s intended and hoped for world (a world where all the brokenness of the world would be healed) is emerging for the sake of the world, and that the church is involved in this process. I believe I’ve said a lot in putting these convictions first. As I write them, I have many thoughts that enter my head, thoughts I plan to write about in the future.

In the months ahead, I hope to write about our need to reclaim a sense of Christian mission for the people of Good Shepherd. I hope you’ll find this blog helpful and will welcome your thoughts and comments about writings I post. I invite you to share this blog with friends and family.