A Book I Wish All Baptists Would Read

Last week I read a book that kept me up until one in the morning: The Autobiography of Cecil Sherman: By My Own Reckoning. Dr. Sherman was the first Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. He was a Baptist pastor who lived through the conflict that tore at the fabric of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979 until 1990. His book gives a clear and straightforward description of what happened. He saw it coming long before most of us did. Fundamentalists would take control of the SBC and shut out all who disagreed with their literal interpretation of the Bible.

He tried to work with them on The Southern Baptist Peace Committee. Moderates on that committee made proposals to divide up the seminaries so that three would teach the Fundamentalist literal approach to the Bible and three would teach the Moderate approach of interpreting the Bible in the light of modern scientific realities. As Dr. Sherman writes, the Fundamentalists never made one proposal that would allow Moderates to stay in the Southern Baptist Convention and have a voice in its direction.

I came away from reading By My Own Reckoning grateful for its honest reporting of how the Southern Baptist Convention as the organization that allowed for differences in approaches to the Bible could not be kept and how the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship became necessary. The voice I hear in this book is blunt, but not unkind. It tells me to feel less anxious about the fact that I can’t change people with whom I disagree. It gives me a deeper appreciation for the freedom of conscience and soul freedom Baptists have lived and died for. It hleps me to see how much I love the freedom we have as partners in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

But what moved me the most was Cecil Sherman’s love. He has loved his wife, cared about the churches he led as pastor, and gave himself to the organizations of Baptists that he served: The SBC until it came to marginalize those who cannot agree with the theology of Fundamentalism and the CBF to which he gave great leadership and worked to develop in its earliest days.
To love is to care about the wellbeing of another without expecting anything in return. Dr. Sherman devoted himself to his wife Dot as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s Disease. With humility and amazing honesty, he provides us with a model of being faithful to your promises. He promised to love and to cherish Dot until death. That is what he did. He promised to provide the best leadership he could to First Baptist Church of Asheville, NC and to Broadway Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, TX. He left them much stronger than when he came. He promised to give good leadership to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. It grew stronger in those early days, because of his self-giving love for free and faithful Baptists.