During the summer of 1990, following the final loss in a decade-long series of dispiriting defeats, moderate Southern Baptist leaders called a meeting in Atlanta. The gathering was labeled the “Consultation of Concerned Baptists.” It was a “last waltz” for those who had been laboring first to stop, then at least to slow the fundamentalist movement from seizing control of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
The SBC’s annual meeting in New Orleans earlier that summer had signaled the end of organized opposition to SBC fundamentalism.
They won. We lost. It was time to fold our tents and consider other lands of promise.
Two hundred people were expected at Atlanta’s Inforum Convention Center that August; 3,000 showed up. The next few days were dramatic, to say the least.
Some mourned over what they’d lost. Others raged against the dying of the light.
The Old Guard longed for “the way things used to be.” Young Turks caucused in the hallways, impatient with the “Back to Egypt” crowd.
It was not at all clear at first what was happening. But it became clear soon enough.
By the time we left, we had blessed the conception of a new Baptist organism, called simply “The Fellowship.” We had also elected an interim Steering Committee to spend the next nine months guiding its gestation and birth. I served on that Interim Steering Committee.
A few months in, our leader, Daniel Vestal, asked Oeita Bottorff and me to plan the initial gathering the following spring in Atlanta. There was so much to do—with no staff, budget, or infrastructure.
I reserved the Omni Coliseum on my credit card. Oeita and I learned to master the “new technology” of the fax machine, sending program proofs back and forth between Texas and North Carolina.
Some of the Interim Steering Committee’s early meetings were painful therapy sessions for the disaffected and exiled. We talked and talked and talked but couldn’t find our way toward much action.
Nostalgia for the SBC wonder years was often palpable. As one of those mournful episodes was peaking, I remember turning to a similarly frustrated friend and saying, “If Morris Chapman [the newly elected SBC president who had defeated Daniel Vestal in New Orleans] were to call right now and say, ‘We’re sorry, please come home,’ half this crowd would be on the road to Nashville within the hour.”
Somehow, we muddled through.
One of the primary reasons was a gentle soul named Daniel Vestal, who was the right person at the right time. Daniel knew Baptists had forgotten how to do two essential things: disagree and laugh. So he regularly asked us to look around the room, find someone with whom we might disagree on an issue, and then go out for 20 minutes to talk together, heart-to-heart.
When we reconvened, we always seemed to approve the next motion unanimously. After learning “holy war” in the SBC, we built this new organism from consensus to consensus.
And Lord, how we laughed!
We rediscovered the joy of our particular outcropping of the kingdom and the joy of our salvation. I experienced more authentic “church” in those meetings than in any other religious gatherings before or since. Blest were the ties that bound our hearts in Christian love.
So we sent out an invitation and, at the May meeting in Atlanta— the first Convocation of The Fellowship— 5,000 noble souls arrived to claim their future. After a lengthy debate, I was elected the first moderator of what was eventually named the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF).
As we were leaving, I called us “free and faithful Baptists.” The label stuck.
Six months later, I had the great privilege of traveling with a group of free and faithful Baptists to the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. There, we handed President John David Hopper a check for $250,000—funds lovingly contributed by CBF supporters to replace those rescinded by the SBC.
The entire first year was like that.
Every ground we broke was new ground. We were composing anthems on Saturday night and singing them on Sunday morning.
It was the best and noblest work of my life. Thirty-three years on, I have had occasion to reflect on those heady days of denominational fermentation and ponder the power of new wine in new wineskins.
The people who birthed and shaped CBF brought a variety of hopes and dreams to the task. Some envisioned little more than the SBC-in-Exile– a shadow convention offering churches a pre-1979 cooperation and mission support structure.
But there also lived among others of us the vibrant hope that we could fashion in the Baptist tradition a home for brave, progressive Christianity.
One of my vivid memories from the early days was the constant pressure to “go slow” from those resistant to the new winds of change.
After the Consultation in 1990, I heard from a lot of new Cooperative Baptists who were mightily chagrined that we had too many women on the platform and sang too few gospel songs. The pressure to crawl was intense.
“Go slow” on women in ministry, many urged.
“Go slow” on liturgical renewal.
“Go slow” on anything friendly to the sensibilities of the Southern Baptist Alliance (later renamed the Alliance of Baptists).
“Go slow” on leaving the SBC.
Thirty-three years on, all that hesitancy seems almost comical. Other denominations had embraced the giftedness of their prophesying daughters decades ago.
CBF churches were slow to follow.
We waited so long to leave that the SBC finally expelled us, depriving us of the joyful opportunity to shake their pharisaic dust off our feet and seek more fertile fields of ministry.
Our fears deprived us of a chance to offer a welcoming voice of love and justice to our LGBTQ+ siblings and next of kin.
And while we were clinging to denominational identity, the post-denominational world arrived and moved right past us.
Lately I’ve become convinced that church was always supposed to be about life, not life about church.
I was raised a wall-to-wall Southern Baptist: Sunbeam, Royal Ambassador, youth group member, Baptist Student Union leader, youth minister, music minister, seminarian, pastor, and state convention leader.
My entire world had church as its axis. And church was about Baptists, “free and faithful” ones, to be sure, but congregational life was lived out within the narrow constraints of our tradition.
How I wish now that I had sent us forth from the Omni in May 1991 with the call to be free and faithful Christians. And how I repent over being held captive for so many years by an insular theology that assumed life at church was the only life we could know.
But today, I am greatly encouraged by the leaders emerging among the CBF family—young women and men who offer us all an opportunity to catch a fresh vision of what God is actually doing in God’s world and encourage us to go and do the same things.
CBF appears to be in good, glad hands. Free and faithful Christians, indeed.
So I cheer us on, albeit from the sidelines, praying that the original dream of a brave and progressive Christianity in the Baptist tradition might yet come to pass, to the praise of God’s glory, for Christ’s sake and ours.
