The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is different from most of the Baptist groups we’ve examined because its story doesn’t begin in seventeenth-century England, on the American frontier, or during the great missionary movements of the nineteenth century. It begins in a denominational fight that many Southern Baptists still remember. CBF was organized in 1991 by Baptists who were dissatisfied with the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention after more than a decade of struggle over biblical authority, denominational leadership, seminaries, women in ministry, and the meaning of historic Baptist freedom.
That makes the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship particularly useful for understanding modern Baptist history. We’ve already looked at the Southern Baptist Convention and what its supporters call the Conservative Resurgence. CBF allows us to look at many of the same events through the eyes of Baptists who believed something valuable was being lost. They didn’t generally think they were abandoning the Baptist tradition. Quite the opposite: they believed principles such as liberty of conscience, local-church autonomy, religious liberty, and freedom from centralized doctrinal control were themselves deeply Baptist convictions.
The Fight That Changed the Southern Baptist Convention
Beginning with the election of Adrian Rogers as SBC president in 1979, conservatives developed an organized strategy for changing the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention. Because the SBC president appointed members of important committees, and those committees influenced the selection of trustees governing seminaries and denominational agencies, repeatedly electing conservative presidents could gradually change the leadership of the convention’s institutions.
That’s essentially what happened during the 1980s and early 1990s. Conservatives argued that the SBC had tolerated theological liberalism and needed to recover confidence in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. Moderates generally replied that conservatives were using concerns about biblical authority to impose a narrower theological conformity upon a Baptist denomination that had historically allowed considerable freedom of interpretation.
Even the name given to the conflict tells you which side is speaking. Supporters usually call it the Conservative Resurgence. Opponents have frequently called it the Fundamentalist Takeover. Those descriptions aren’t interchangeable historical facts; they’re interpretations of the same denominational struggle. What isn’t seriously disputed is the result: by the early 1990s, conservatives had gained effective control of the major institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Birth of CBF
In 1990, a large gathering of moderate Baptists met in Atlanta to consider their future. The following year, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was formally organized. Its founders wanted to create a place where churches and individuals could cooperate in missions and ministry while preserving what they regarded as historic Baptist freedoms.
The choice of the word Fellowship was deliberate. CBF could have called itself another convention, denomination, association, or union, but it chose language intended to emphasize voluntary cooperation rather than centralized control. Current CBF leadership still explains the name in precisely those terms: the Fellowship exists to help congregations flourish rather than to dominate or police them.
That doesn’t mean CBF has no organization. It has a governing board, executive leadership, councils, a General Assembly, mission personnel, regional organizations, partner institutions, and constitutional bylaws. It is a real ecclesiastical organization, not merely an informal mailing list. The difference lies primarily in how CBF understands the relationship between that organization and its churches.
Is CBF a Denomination?
This is one of those Baptist questions where the answer depends partly upon what we mean by the word. CBF generally describes itself as a fellowship or network rather than emphasizing the label denomination. Its constitution allows Baptist churches, church members, and individuals to participate through various forms of partnership. A congregation doesn’t surrender its autonomy to CBF, and CBF doesn’t function as a bishop or presbytery exercising authority over local churches.
Functionally, however, CBF does many things denominations do. It coordinates missions, supports theological education and ministry formation, provides resources to churches, endorses chaplains and pastoral counselors, develops leaders, supports church planting, convenes an annual assembly, and maintains relationships with other Baptist bodies. It is also recognized as a distinct Baptist body within the larger Baptist world.
So calling CBF a Baptist fellowship is probably the most accurate approach because that’s how it intentionally understands itself. But someone looking at its ministries from the outside could be forgiven for thinking, “That looks suspiciously like a denomination.” Baptists have been finding creative ways not to call their denominations “denominations” for quite some time.
Baptist Freedom
One of the best ways to understand CBF is through the idea of Baptist freedom. Cooperative Baptists generally emphasize several related freedoms: the freedom of the individual believer to approach God without an earthly priesthood standing between them, the freedom of the local congregation to govern itself, the freedom to interpret Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and religious liberty for both Christians and non-Christians.
Those ideas aren’t unique to CBF. They run deeply through Baptist history. Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams, John Leland, and generations of other Baptists defended liberty of conscience long before anyone had heard of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
The disagreement is over what those principles require in practice. Conservatives can affirm local-church autonomy and soul competency while also insisting that denominational institutions need meaningful doctrinal boundaries. CBF Baptists tend to worry more about those boundaries becoming instruments of centralized control.
That tension between accountability and freedom is one of the recurring arguments in Baptist history. CBF landed heavily on the freedom side.
What About the Bible?
It would be misleading to say that the SBC believed the Bible while CBF didn’t. That caricature might make denominational warfare easier, but it doesn’t explain the actual disagreement. Cooperative Baptists affirm Scripture as central to Christian faith and practice, but they have generally resisted requiring every cooperating church or minister to subscribe to an increasingly detailed denominational interpretation of Scripture. They place greater emphasis upon believers and congregations reading Scripture within Christian community under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Critics see a danger in that approach. If doctrinal boundaries become too broad, biblical authority can gradually become whatever an individual or congregation decides Scripture means. CBF Baptists generally see the opposite danger: a denominational institution can claim to defend biblical authority while actually enforcing one group’s interpretation of disputed passages.
Both concerns are worth understanding. The argument isn’t simply whether Scripture has authority. It is also about who gets to determine the boundaries of acceptable interpretation.
No Baptist Pope—Still
CBF’s emphasis on congregational autonomy means its national organization doesn’t function as a teaching office capable of dictating doctrine to every affiliated congregation. Churches can differ significantly in worship style, theological emphasis, political outlook, and interpretation of disputed issues.
That creates a fairly large theological tent. A person visiting two CBF churches could encounter congregations that feel quite different from one another. Some retain a traditional Southern Baptist atmosphere, while others resemble mainline Protestant congregations in worship, ministry, or social engagement.
That diversity is intentional, but it also creates tension. A broad fellowship has to decide how broad it can become before the things holding it together are no longer substantial enough to provide a meaningful identity. CBF has wrestled with that question throughout its history, and it probably always will. Of course, Baptists wrestling with the limits of Baptist cooperation isn’t exactly a new development.
Women in Ministry
Women in ministry became one of the clearest distinctions between CBF and the increasingly conservative SBC. Cooperative Baptists have supported the ordination and pastoral leadership of women from the Fellowship’s beginning, and CBF works closely with Baptist Women in Ministry.
The distinction became even sharper as the Southern Baptist Convention strengthened its position that the office of pastor is limited to qualified men. CBF’s current leadership states explicitly that God calls women as well as men to preaching, pastoral leadership, and service as senior pastors.
This isn’t merely theoretical. Women serve as pastors, ministers, chaplains, missionaries, denominational leaders, and theological educators throughout the CBF world. At the same time, CBF itself acknowledges that affirming women in ministry on paper doesn’t mean women have achieved equal representation in every area of Baptist leadership.
For someone coming from a complementarian position, this is one of the places where I would disagree with CBF. But understanding why Cooperative Baptists reached their conclusion requires more than dismissing them as people who stopped taking the Bible seriously. They believe their position arises from Scripture and from their understanding of the Spirit’s gifting and calling of women. We can disagree with an interpretation without pretending the people holding it never opened a Bible.
Theology Without a Narrow Confession
CBF doesn’t operate around a single detailed confession functioning exactly like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message. This fits its emphasis upon congregational freedom and cooperation among Baptists who don’t agree on every secondary issue.
Broadly speaking, CBF churches remain within the Baptist Christian tradition. They emphasize Jesus Christ, Scripture, conversion, believer’s baptism, congregational life, missions, religious liberty, and the priesthood of believers. But considerable diversity exists over questions that other denominations might settle through formal confessional standards.
That makes CBF difficult to summarize with a checklist. It is easier to describe the center of the Fellowship than to draw a precise theological boundary around every congregation. For some Christians, that flexibility is one of CBF’s greatest strengths. For others, it is one of its greatest weaknesses. Both reactions make sense.
Missions Didn’t Disappear
Because CBF arose from denominational controversy, it’s easy to tell its history entirely as a story about what it opposed. That would miss one of the main reasons it was created.
Moderate Baptists still wanted to send missionaries. They still wanted to plant churches, train ministers, support chaplains, help congregations, and participate in Christian ministry around the world. One of CBF’s original purposes was to provide an alternative channel through which Baptists could support missions and theological education without directing their resources through the increasingly conservative SBC structure.
Global missions remains a major part of CBF’s identity. Its current description of Christian mission deliberately combines evangelism with social transformation, emphasizing both proclamation and ministry to physical and social needs. That combination is another characteristic of modern CBF. The Fellowship doesn’t generally treat evangelism and social ministry as competitors. It wants both.
Seminaries and Theological Education
The SBC controversy demonstrated how important seminaries are in denominational life. When moderate Baptists lost influence over the six Southern Baptist seminaries, alternative institutions and theological partnerships became increasingly important.
CBF consequently developed relationships with theological schools that could prepare ministers for Cooperative Baptist churches. Rather than building a centralized seminary system comparable to the SBC’s six seminaries, it developed a network of partnerships and relationships with theological institutions.
That approach fits the larger CBF philosophy. Instead of constructing one enormous denominational machine, the Fellowship tends to work through networks, partnerships, congregations, schools, and specialized ministries. It is less centralized by design.
CBF and the Southern Baptist Convention
One of the most interesting things about CBF is that the separation from the SBC was never as clean as people might assume. Especially in the early years, some churches supported both organizations. A congregation might send money to CBF missions while retaining some relationship with the Southern Baptist Convention or a state Baptist convention. That is possible because Baptist churches are autonomous and can choose their own affiliations and financial partnerships.
This makes CBF different from a denomination created by a formal church schism in which every congregation must choose one side or the other. CBF developed more like an alternative network gradually establishing its own identity. Over time the distance between CBF and the SBC has grown. The two bodies now represent noticeably different trajectories within Baptist Christianity, particularly concerning women in ministry, denominational authority, theological diversity, and engagement with social issues.
But historically, CBF makes little sense apart from the SBC. It is part of the Southern Baptist family story even though it developed into a separate Baptist body.
What About Sexuality?
This is one of the subjects that demonstrates both the breadth and the difficulty of the CBF model. CBF congregations don’t all approach questions of sexuality in exactly the same way. Because local churches are autonomous and the Fellowship encompasses considerable theological diversity, individual congregations can occupy different positions. That has produced internal disagreements over LGBTQ inclusion, hiring policies, missions, and the boundaries of cooperation.
This isn’t surprising. Once an organization makes local autonomy and theological freedom central principles, controversial questions inevitably test how far those principles extend. For Jew & Greek, the important distinction is between describing CBF fairly and agreeing with every position found within it. I can appreciate its defense of religious liberty, local-church autonomy, and freedom of conscience while disagreeing with positions that some Cooperative Baptists take on sexuality, women in pastoral leadership, or other theological questions. That’s one reason studying denominations is useful. Agreement doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Religious Liberty and Church-State Separation
Religious liberty remains one of CBF’s strongest public commitments. The Fellowship consistently connects that position with historic Baptist convictions about liberty of conscience, local-church autonomy, and separation of church and state. That commitment continues to affect its public ministry. CBF participates in advocacy involving religious liberty, immigration, refugees, and other issues where it believes church freedom or human dignity is involved. Its current leadership explicitly identifies religious liberty and church-state separation as convictions present since CBF’s founding.
Christians can disagree about particular applications of those principles while recognizing their Baptist pedigree. Baptists were defending religious liberty long before modern American political categories existed. The harder question has always been determining what religious liberty requires in a particular controversy.
Politics and the Pulpit
Because CBF congregations often engage questions of racial justice, immigration, poverty, religious liberty, and other public concerns, outsiders can sometimes assume the Fellowship is simply the politically liberal counterpart to the conservative SBC.
That’s too simple. There is certainly a different political and cultural center of gravity in much of CBF life, but the Fellowship contains congregations and individuals with a range of political views. CBF writers themselves describe many congregations as politically and theologically diverse, sometimes making pastoral ministry particularly challenging.
The more useful observation is that CBF tends to be comfortable with the language of public witness and social justice as part of Christian mission. That can lead its ministries into areas that some conservative Baptists would approach differently or avoid institutionally. Whether that represents faithful Christian witness or excessive political involvement has to be evaluated issue by issue rather than settled by attaching a political label to the entire Fellowship.
The Baptist World Beyond the SBC
CBF also reminds American Christians that the Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t define the entire Baptist world. The Fellowship participates in broader Baptist relationships and has connections with the Baptist World Alliance and numerous ministry partners. This places Cooperative Baptists within an international Baptist community containing denominations and traditions that developed independently of Southern Baptist history.
That matters because American Baptist discussions can become strangely provincial. We can spend so much time arguing about the SBC that we forget Baptists exist all over the world and have been developing different theological, cultural, and organizational traditions for centuries. CBF intentionally sees itself within that larger Baptist family.
CBF Today
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship reached its thirty-fifth year in 2026. Paul Baxley serves as Executive Coordinator, and the Fellowship continues to operate through congregations, individuals, state and regional organizations, global missions personnel, partner institutions, ministry networks, chaplaincy, church planting, theological education, and an annual General Assembly.
Its contemporary language emphasizes inviting people into community, equipping churches for ministry, and participating in the transformation of God’s world. Missions remains central, but CBF describes mission broadly enough to include evangelism, congregational development, global service, justice, poverty alleviation, ministry among immigrants and refugees, and other forms of Christian witness.
CBF remains much smaller than the Southern Baptist Convention, but size isn’t the primary reason it matters historically. It represents one of the most important institutional outcomes of the conflict that transformed the SBC during the late twentieth century.
Was the Conservative Resurgence Necessary?
This is the question lurking underneath almost every discussion of CBF. Conservative Southern Baptists would argue that the resurgence was necessary because denominational institutions had drifted from confidence in biblical authority and needed theological correction. From that perspective, CBF represents Baptists who resisted a legitimate conservative recovery.
Many Cooperative Baptists tell the story differently. They believe the controversy used biblical inerrancy as a rallying issue while concentrating denominational power, narrowing acceptable interpretation, restricting women, and dismantling the older culture of Baptist freedom. From that perspective, CBF preserved principles the SBC was abandoning.
History doesn’t require us to choose between caricatures. The Conservative Resurgence unquestionably changed the Southern Baptist Convention. It moved seminaries and agencies in a more consistently conservative theological direction and established clearer doctrinal expectations. It also produced enormous institutional conflict, displaced leaders and professors, fractured relationships, and contributed directly to the creation of alternative Baptist organizations such as CBF.
Whether someone calls that a rescue or a takeover tells us something about how that person interprets the conflict. Understanding the history requires hearing why both descriptions arose.
Why the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Matters
CBF completes an important part of our Baptist story because it demonstrates that Baptist divisions aren’t always about baptism, Calvinism, missions, or foot washing. Sometimes Baptists agree about most traditional Baptist distinctives and still divide over who gets to define the boundaries of acceptable belief.
That is essentially the question underneath the CBF story. How much theological agreement does cooperation require? How much authority should a convention exercise over seminaries and institutions? How should Baptists respond when they believe denominational leaders are moving in the wrong direction? Does doctrinal accountability protect biblical Christianity, or can it become a mechanism for enforcing interpretations that Scripture itself doesn’t require? At what point does freedom become theological vagueness, and at what point does accountability become control?
Those questions don’t have easy answers, which is probably why Baptists have been arguing about versions of them for four centuries. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship answered by emphasizing fellowship, voluntary cooperation, local-church autonomy, freedom of conscience, missions, and a relatively broad theological tent. The Southern Baptist Convention moved toward stronger confessional boundaries and institutional accountability. More than thirty years later, the two movements demonstrate how dramatically different Baptist communities can grow from the same denominational soil.