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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.
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