Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship formed in 1991 as the organized response of moderate Southern Baptists who found the post-resurgence SBC unrecognizable. Its founding represented a formal split — not a clean denominational break, since most CBF congregations retained dual membership for years, but an organizational alternative for Baptists who rejected the resurgence's theology and methods. Cecil Sherman, who had publicly named the Patterson-Pressler operation as institutional capture throughout the 1980s, became CBF's first national coordinator (1991–1996). His presence at the founding was not incidental — the CBF was built by people who had watched the resurgence happen and refused to follow it. The CBF ordains women, affirms historic Baptist principles of soul competency and congregational autonomy, and has been more open (though not without internal tension) to LGBTQ inclusion than the SBC. Its theological institutions — including McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, and Wake Forest School of Divinity — represent the alternative pastoral training pipeline: seminaries where the resurgence's theological tests were not the price of admission. The CBF's significance to this map is specific: it is evidence that the SBC's current theological profile is not 'historic Baptist.' It is the product of a deliberate political operation that displaced a different tradition. The CBF is what was displaced. That tradition did not disappear — it continued in a different institutional form, with fewer resources and far less political influence. The resurgence built an expressway; the CBF built a side road.

Documented themes

• Political Strategy
• politics-and-the-pulpit

Connections from Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

• opposed → SBC Conservative Resurgence (1991) — The CBF formed explicitly as an alternative to the post-resurgence SBC, representing the moderate Baptist tradition the resurgence had displaced.

Connections to Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

• Cecil Sherman influenced (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.

Sources

• Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 60-68