From Stuttgart with Gratitude: How a German Baptist Congregation Made Invite Welcome Connect Its Own
An Unexpected Email from Germany
Every so often, a message arrives that reminds us why we do this ministry. Earlier this year, an email landed in the Invite Welcome Connect inbox from a pastor we had never met, writing from a congregation we had never heard of, in a country far from the Episcopal churches where Invite Welcome Connect began.
Pastor Meredith Forssman serves Bethelkirche, a German Baptist congregation in Stuttgart, Germany. She wrote to tell us how deeply Invite Welcome Connect has shaped her church. After reading our Founder Mary Foster Parmer’s book, watching the teaching videos on our website, and translating the workbook into German, she and her church council used their annual retreat as the launch point for a church-wide journey. The results have been remarkable. Bethelkirche has changed how it communicates, how it structures coffee hour, how it accompanies newcomers through a dedicated class, and how it builds community through a new small groups initiative. This spring alone, the congregation of 190 welcomed five new members. And in a story every Invite Welcome Connect congregation will recognize, the “five-minute rule” has taken root after Sunday services, with members so attentive to visitors that the pastor sometimes can’t even get a word in.
A Surprise Rooted in Munich
Mary was delighted, and a little stunned. When she saw the subject line, she assumed the writer must have been part of one of the Episcopal congregations that attended the Invite Welcome Connect workshop she led in May 2017. That workshop was part of the Academy for Parish Leadership Conference, hosted by the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe at the Schloss Fuerstenried Conference Center in Munich. Clergy and laity from Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, and Switzerland took part, and Mary was also invited to preach. Pastor Forssman, it turned out, had no connection to that gathering at all. She had simply found Invite Welcome Connect on her own, through Episcopal colleagues in the United States who kept telling her about it.
The timing mattered, too. Invite Welcome Connect is in a season of transition. We are now an official non-profit, we are updating our website, and we are looking at how to reach beyond The Episcopal Church, which has been our sole focus for years. Mary had led only one workshop for another tradition, for a group of Lutheran churches in Akron, Ohio, in the fall of 2022. A pastor willing to take the time to “make it yours” in a different language and a different denomination was, in Mary’s words, a huge gift.
So Mary wrote back with five questions. What follows is that email interview, shared with Pastor Forssman’s permission.
The Interview
Mary Foster Parmer: I’m curious about your story. You mention you are originally from Lexington, Kentucky. Did you grow up in a particular faith tradition, and if so, which one? When did you receive your call to ordained ministry? Where did you attend seminary?
Meredith Forssman: Yes, I did grow up in Lexington, KY attending Calvary Baptist Church, a “big steeple” downtown church (just a couple of blocks from Christ Church Cathedral). Calvary is a moderate Baptist church—ordained women for many decades still as a Southern Baptist congregation, and eventually became a CBF-affiliated congregation. So I grew up around women ministers and thankfully never really questioned if I was “allowed” as a woman to be called to ministry. As a high school senior I started to feel the first inklings of a calling. I attended Samford University at Birmingham, AL and always say that was when I first really moved to the Bible belt and realized what Southern Baptists are really like.
But those were really good formative years at Samford thanks to the Religion Department and my experience working at Passport Camps each summer during college. Are you familiar with Passport? They have a big “home base” among Baptists but they are very intentionally ecumenical, and I know some Episcopal churches attend their camps. Anyways, I worked for four summers during college and grad school for Passport, and in that time felt more solidified in my call to ministry—imagining that I would like to work with college students, youth, and children in the future. But the other thing that really called to me was academics—I loved my theology classes and professors at Samford and also dreamed of one day doing a PhD and working in higher education.
I went on to do my MDiv at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, and decided after two years to study abroad at the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the University of Munich. I was in Munich for the academic year 2012–2013 and fell in love with my husband, a German. He is a pastor’s kid x2, both of his parents being Lutheran pastors in Bavaria.
After a year in Munich, I had to return to Candler to finish my MDiv. Summer of 2014 after graduation I was ordained by my home congregation in Lexington, we got married in Atlanta, and then I moved back to Munich.
Starting that fall I had a part-time gig for Passport as the editor of d365.org—you might also be familiar with d365 since The Episcopal Church (Youth Ministries Office) along with PC USA, ELCA and CBF are the sponsors of the daily devotional site and app. I continued to edit d365 for 9 years, so I had connections with lots of Episcopal ministers and writers over the years and also with Bronwyn Clark Skov and then Myra Garnes.
Along with my d365 work, I took a job at the Office for Youth Ministry in the Baptist Convention of Bavaria. This was my “foot in the door” with the German Baptist Union (BEFG), and eventually they recognized my ordination. When I was called to my current congregation in 2016, I also officially became a Pastor in the German Baptist Union.
I started here at Bethelkirche in Stuttgart working with youth and children. Then through a series of ministry transitions, I became co-pastor in 2019 and then lead-pastor in 2022.
If you’d ask me as a seminary student if I would ever pastor a congregation, I would have said no! But this is where the path has taken me, and I have felt a continued sense of calling to this particular congregation for the 10 years I’ve been here, and it has been a great place to grow into the role. Particularly this phase since we’ve been doing Invite Welcome Connect has made me feel like I’ve finally found “my thing”—a shared vision—it’s the imprint that I will leave on this congregation.
Mary Foster Parmer: Please tell me about the German Baptist church.
Meredith Forssman: Well… I’m not a great church historian. German Baptists date back to 1834, when Johann Gerhard Oncken founded the first congregation in Hamburg.. Our congregation in Stuttgart is the 4th oldest Baptist church in Germany—the first Baptist church in southern Germany. But the movement spread throughout the country, and in the Hitler era, the Baptist and Brethren churches were pressured to merge into a union, which is still known as Bund Evangelisch Freikirchliche Gemeinde (BEFG) today.
The BEFG along with the Union of Pentecostal Churches, United Methodist Church, and a smattering of other smaller denominations are considered “Freikirchen”—“free churches” in Germany, because we are not funded by church taxes, as the big established churches (Lutheran/Reformed Churches and Catholic Church) are. Just to put things in perspective: the Baptist Union is one of the largest Freikirchen, with about 72,000 members in all of Germany, which is less than .1% of the national population. So in our very secular German society, all of the “free churches” have to deal with a bit of prejudice (I’ve been asked: “Are you guys a cult?”) since we’re a super minority. However, the German Baptist Union is represented in all of the ecumenical bodies of Germany and also a member of the World Council of Churches.
I would say that on a national level, the BEFG is theologically moderate to progressive—if you look at the seminary and leadership—but of course there are all “flavors” of congregation. Whereas in the US you have multiple Baptist groupings that are divided along theological and geographical lines—in Germany there is greater diversity combined into one union together.
Bethelkirche, my specific church, is on the progressive end of the spectrum in BEFG. We are welcoming of everyone, including queer folks, which is more of an exception in the BEFG, but there is growing openness. Our congregation is also quite ecumenical in the sense that we have people who grew up Lutheran and Catholic and people who grew up as Baptist, Methodist, etc. and have found their church home with us. We don’t require re-baptism for believers who were baptized as infants, which also makes us kind of special in the Baptist landscape—and is very important for our ecumenical relationships on a local level.
Mary Foster Parmer: I am very interested in what specifically you used from the website in planning and implementing your retreat and follow-up. Were the old teaching videos still there? In the early years of developing Invite Welcome Connect, there were many times that certain entities suggested that I should start charging for use of the videos and checklists, etc., and it was always my belief that the materials should stay open-source for as long as possible. Of course, now that we are an official non-profit entity and really considered a “start-up”
organization, we need sources of income to ensure that the ministry is sustainable going forward. This is why we now have the On Demand teaching videos, which were created about a year ago, and are offered through diocesan and individual congregational subscriptions.
Meredith Forssman: So I had your book on my shelf for a few years and re-read it in summer of 2024 when we decided to start this process for that fall. And in preparation, I watched all the teaching videos I could find…. I translated the workbook into German, and I pretty much read and watched anything I could get my hands on. . . .
Mary Foster Parmer: The fact that you translated the materials and adapted the content for your German Baptist context is so encouraging and amazing to me, and I’m curious to know if it was difficult for you to do this. I’ve led only one workshop for another faith tradition other than The Episcopal church, and it was for a group of Lutheran churches in Akron, Ohio, in the fall of 2022. We’ve been focused for years strictly on the Episcopal church, so your willingness to take the time to “make it yours” is a huge gift for us!
Meredith Forssman: Of course simply the language translation is one thing—a matter of effort and time. And then there is the matter of cultural translation. Some things felt very US-and Episcopal-church-specific and didn’t translate as well, for example: “Sharing Faith Dinners”—I would just leave it in English and then say “This is the idea behind it; there are these cards, that are specific to The Episcopal church; but what could this look like in our context?”
Probably the hardest part—or where I just ran out of time and steam—was getting all the additional resources and ideas from the workbook or toolkit subbed out for German resources. Articles, books, etc.—can’t easily be replicated in German. In some cases, I was able to easily find a German equivalent, like a spiritual-gifts assessment. And I also added some German-Baptist-specific evangelism formats and resources into the workbook. And some things I would just leave in English if I thought the ideas were valuable but hard to translate.
So—it was a lot of work, but I wouldn’t say it was especially difficult. The theology resonates for us, and that was perhaps most important for it “clicking” with our church.
Why This Story Matters
Pastor Forssman put it best when she wrote that Invite Welcome Connect has given her congregation “not just tools, but a renewed sense of calling—and a shared language for what it means to be Christ’s presence in our neighborhood.” Her story offers a glimpse of what happens when a church takes hospitality seriously enough to make it its own: translating not only the words, but the culture, and keeping what resonates.
To learn more about Pastor Forssman’s congregation, visit the Bethelkirche website. And if your congregation, in any tradition or any language, is ready to begin its own Invite Welcome Connect journey, we would love to hear from you.
Learn more about scheduling your own workshop with Invite Welcome Connect Founder Mary Foster Parmer.
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