Cecil Sherman

Cecil Sherman (1928–2007) spent his pastoral career at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas (1970–1987) and then Woodmont Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee (1987–1991). He was a lifelong Southern Baptist, a gifted preacher, and a theologian with serious academic formation. When the Conservative Resurgence began in 1979, Sherman was among the first inside the SBC to recognize and publicly name what was happening. While resurgence leaders presented the campaign as a principled defense of biblical inerrancy, Sherman argued — publicly, repeatedly, and with specific evidence — that the inerrancy debate was a vehicle for a political takeover. The goal was not theological renewal; it was institutional control. He watched the messenger vote operations, the coordinated presidential campaigns, and the trustee appointments, and he called them what they were: a political operation being run through ecclesiastical structures. This made him a target. The resurgence leadership treated internal critics as threats to be neutralized rather than theologians to be engaged. Sherman's public dissent meant that the churches and institutions he was connected to came under pressure. His analysis was not rewarded; it was confirmed — the resurgence's response to his criticism demonstrated that the movement was not interested in theological debate. When moderate Baptists accepted by 1990 that the resurgence had won — that the SBC's institutions were captured and the theological diversity of the pre-resurgence denomination was gone — Sherman helped organize the response. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship formed in 1991 as the organized alternative: a network of moderate Baptist churches and institutions that preserved historic Baptist principles of congregational autonomy and theological diversity. Sherman served as CBF's first national coordinator from 1991 to 1996, building the organization from a gathering of displaced moderates into a functioning alternative denomination. Sherman's significance to this network is specific: virtually every other opposition figure documented here pushed back after the capture was complete. Sherman named the operation while it was in progress. His account of what he witnessed — documented in CBF archives, oral histories, and his own writing — is the clearest inside testimony that the resurgence was understood by those living through it as a political project, not a theological one. He died in Fort Worth in 2007.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Christian Nationalism
• Patriarchy
• politics-and-the-pulpit

Connections from Cecil Sherman

• influenced → Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (1991) — Cecil Sherman became the first national coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship when it was formally organized in 1991, serving in that role until 1996. His appointment was not incidental — Sherman had spent the preceding decade publicly arguing that the resurgence was an institutional capture operation, and the CBF was the organized response of those who accepted that the capture had succeeded and that an alternative was necessary. Sherman brought to the CBF his clear-eyed analysis of what had happened: the SBC had not been renewed theologically; it had been seized politically. The CBF would be built on the Baptist principles that the resurgence had displaced — congregational autonomy, theological diversity, and the priesthood of all believers.
• opposed → SBC Conservative Resurgence (1979) — Cecil Sherman was among the first inside the SBC to publicly name the Patterson-Pressler operation as a political takeover rather than a theological renewal — and he did so while it was in progress, not after it had succeeded. Throughout the 1980s, Sherman argued that the resurgence was using inerrancy as a pretext for institutional capture, and that its methods — coordinated messenger vote mobilization, trustee manipulation, and systematic faculty pressure — were the methods of a political campaign, not a theological movement. He helped organize the moderate caucus within the SBC that attempted to resist the resurgence through the 1980s. When resistance failed and the institutions were lost, he was present at the formation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as the organized alternative.

Sources

• Takeover: The Long War for the Soul of the Southern Baptist Convention — Bob Allen (2011), pp. 45–160
• The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention — Rob James and Gary Leazer (1989), pp. 1–120
• Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 60–68