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  In Response To ... The Changing Face of
                                    CBF and the South

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Note: This essay first appeared in the August 2008 Baptist Studies Bulletin.

          With age comes change, or so argues Newsweek correspondent Christopher Dickey in his recent insightful analysis of how Barrack Obama's presidential bid reveals a South finally outgrowing its past. In short, Dickey re-examines the theme of southern exceptionalism and concludes that most residents of the modern South have no personal memories of the Civil Rights Movement. The journey beyond Civil Rights consciousness is unfolding, Dickey notes, against the backdrop of the rapid growth of Hispanics, a people group both unaware of and uninterested in the ever-present southern past.
          While reading Dickey's analysis, my mind could not help but wander to recent debate over generational friction within the life of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, itself an inherently southern institution (albeit with national presence, racial and cultural inclusiveness, and global focus). Following this summer's General Assembly, a group of young CBF leaders called upon Dr. Cecil Sherman, longtime renowned pastor and founding coordinator of CBF, to refrain from using certain analogies in communicating the significance of the fundamentalist/moderate controversy.  It is time, the young leaders assert, to move beyond the pains of the past with which young moderate Baptists have no personal associations, and embrace a future free of bitterness.
           Indeed, CBF has matured to the point where battle-scared veterans of the political wars and young men and women with no memories of the birthing of the Fellowship are two sides of the same coin. The battles to preserve traditional Baptist faith and heritage gave birth to the seminaries that raised up today's young moderate Baptist leadership. Organizationally, the Fellowship yet depends on the wisdom and counsel of long-time leaders. At the same time, the survival of CBF is increasingly in the hands of the young generations, whose missional worldview is now incorporated into the Fellowship's marrow.
           On one side of this coin, Cecil Sherman's autobiography, released in June, looks to the past in chronicling the life of the man whom Walter Shurden considers "the most important white, moderate Baptist in the South in the last two decades of the twentieth century."  In July, Sherman began treatment for acute leukemia, and on August 1, Dot, his wife of almost 55 years, died at the age of 90. With the passing of Dot Sherman and Dr. Sherman now in his twilight years, one side of the Fellowship coin shines a little less bright.
           The other side of the Fellowship coin, unapologetically facing the future, gazes upon a hurting and hungry world that has no interest in wars over religious doctrine and less and less concern regarding institutional preservation. Feeling constrained by the past from fully engaging the present and future, some young leaders' frustrations are very real, for all religious organizations are struggling to adapt to a post-modern world.
           Of the South, Christopher Dickey writes, "there is a sense that a world is ending, maybe not this year, but inevitably." Although the painful birthing of CBF recesses further into the past with each passing day, the narrative of a still young Fellowship cannot truly be told without reference to the beginning. I believe that CBFers young and old share much common ground in terms of appreciation of Baptist faith and heritage preserved through the struggle. The older generation expended personal and emotional capital and reaped hard-earned dividends that were invested in the shaping of CBF. The younger generations are now ready to invest their own personal and emotional capital as Baptists, and they are turning to new opportunities of ministry, afforded by globalization and technology and focused on the inequalities and injustices in this world, for which Baptist ideals such as religious freedom, freedom of conscience and autonomous faith communities composed of equals, are well-suited. Years from now, when the younger generations then in their old age draw upon the dividends of their own faith investments, I trust they will do so as Baptists, in the context of more than four centuries of Baptist witness, and for the ongoing good of Baptists and all world citizens―as did the generations preceding them.