German campus minister shares her baptism story

Nora Lahmann-Vogt was a student at the Unterwegs campus ministry in Tübingen, Germany, when she came to faith in Christ and was baptized. Now, she serves as a campus minister herself at the Unterwegs in Freiburg, Germany.

In a wonderful example of Globalscope’s creed — “You belong before you believe,” — Nora was drawn to Christianity initially through the warmth of the Unterwegs community. But a period of intense Bible reading and study with campus minister Tony Cole was the tipping point in bringing her to faith. Enjoy her beautiful baptism story here.

“I loved my baptism. The way it came about was actually kind of funny. In the summer of 2017, Tony brought up baptism for the first time. By then, we’ve had quite a lot of conversations about me believing and what all of it meant but I was so not ready to even think about getting baptized. So, we dropped it and didn’t really talk about it much.

“Then, for our winter retreat in 2018, I was asked by our guest speaker to share my story with faith over the last year. That was the first time I ever officially took on the identity of being a Christian. Up until that point, I had talked to my closest friends about starting to believe in God but kept it all very private. That weekend, I talked about it in front of the group and that changed almost everything. It felt like the point of no return. That was the moment I truly let God into my life and being a Christian became a part of me.

“After that weekend, I went to Tony and told him that I wanted to talk about baptism again. I wasn’t planning on actually getting baptized anytime soon but just wanted to know more about it. So, we talked for about an hour and in the end, Tony asked me if I wanted to get baptized. I decided that I would take a literal leap of faith and just go ahead and do it. I didn’t want it to be a big thing, just the team and a handful of others who were important in my faith journey. The Crawfords (teammates Tyler and Shalynn) generously offered us their living room as the location and Tyler figured out a way to fill a kiddie pool with enough water to submerge me.

“I absolutely love that we did that; it felt like the perfect way for me to get baptized. Tony led us through the baptism and the people who had had the biggest impact on my journey all had a small part in the ceremony. It was a fairly surreal day. I came straight from a different event I had in the morning and just all of it was beyond my wildest imagination. But it was so much fun and felt so, so special. It is one of my favourite memories. Having all these people in the room with me, it was easy to see how many great things can happen through faith and what a positive impact faith can have on a person’s life — in this case, my own.”