Surrounded by members of Tabor Mennonite Church, Daniel Funke, left, and Nathan Ensz walk to the water to be baptized. — Photo by Kim Funk

Perhaps Daniel Funke’s journey to faith really began while he waited in Germany during the summer of 2005, wondering where he would go as an exchange student.

Months passed. It appeared nobody wanted him. Nobody, that is, except an elderly couple in faraway Kansas.

“God showed me the way to a family and small congregation about two years ago,” said Funke, now 20. “Today I see it as a divine connection that brought me into a home that was moving me in the right direction.”

Rudy and Nola Schmidt weren’t looking to host an exchange student. They were retired and in their 80s.

When approached about hosting Funke, their initial thought, according to Nola, was “we knew better than to think we could do it.”

“But he needed a place to go,” Rudy added. “So we said yes.”

Funke spent the school year with the Schmidts — sitting in on family devotions, attending Tabor Mennonite Church worship services and youth group, playing football and running track at Goessel High School.

As far as devotions and church, he participated, but it was more out of courtesy and respect than desire.

“I grew up in a family that did not believe in God,” Funke said. “God, Jesus and the Bible were nothing more than part of a story, and the Bible was nothing more than a long book I was never going to read.”

In May 2006, Funke graduated from Goessel High School, and the Schmidts gave him a Bible as a graduation gift. Nola had been determined to give him a Bible but wasn’t sure which translation to buy and whether it should be in English or German. Then, one day while working at the Newton Etcetera shop, she saw a brand new Bible that had been donated to the thrift store.

“It was the New Living Bible and exactly what I was looking for,” she said. “I believe that was a God thing.”

Rudy was a bit skeptical but supported his wife.

“My feeling was that he wasn’t going to read it anyway, but we wanted him to have it in case he would ever want to,” he said.

Funke took the Bible home to Germany, and one evening he started to read. He began at the beginning, finished Genesis and continued into Exodus.

Then the divorce of his parents brought pain into his life, and he didn’t take time to read anymore.

“At some point in January [2007], I tried to find the Bible again to continue my reading in Exodus,” Funke said. “The bad news was, I couldn’t find it.”

So he bought a New Testament and read the Gospels and Acts. While reading one of Paul’s letters, a thought came to him: This is the truth.

“Ever since that moment of truth, I’ve turned to the Bible every day, because it is my source of how to live and how not to,” he said. “I finally found that Bible I got for graduation again, so I was able to study the Old Testament as well.”

Funke returned to Kansas this summer to visit the Schmidts and his other friends. He went along on a youth group trip to San Antonio, Texas.

When youth pastor Doug Krehbiel heard about Funke’s faith journey, he suggested a baptism. When Funke talked to his friend Nathan Ensz about it, they decided they wanted to be baptized together.

For Corey Miller, Tabor’s pastor, the events that led to the baptisms of Funke and Ensz in August are made up of both divine and human connections.

“At first they just wanted to be baptized but didn’t want to join as members of Tabor — a growing issue that many Mennonite congregations are grappling with,” Miller said. “But the more we talked and the more they experienced the community supporting them, encouraging them and loving them, they both saw the wisdom and necessity of being a part of community. That’s why we don’t separate baptism from membership.”

Today, Funke is a student in Gymnasium Heepen in Bielefeld, Germany. He will be back in Kansas this Christmas, and he’s looking into the possibility of a youth ministry degree from a Mennonite college.