What's happening in the Southern Baptist Convention, part 3: not all Baptists are Southern Baptists (even in the South)
This might be significant, but the SBC isn’t the only Baptist game in town. Below is an excerpt from my college capstone project, written in 1999.
Women were disheartened by the SBC’s public attack on their rights and abilities to serve God in any capacity, but moderates were awakened to action. In 1986 they formed the Southern Baptist Alliance (SBA), a body which chair Henry Crouch hoped would be “a voice of conscience in the Convention.” Though many moderates did not support the SBA because they still had hopes of retaining representation in the SBC, the SBA was the first organization to lend continuing financial support to Southern Baptist Women in Ministry. Nancy Hasting Sehested’s call to the pastorate at Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in 1987 was a landmark in Southern Baptist women’s struggles to become accepted as legitimate members of the ministerial community and showed both Baptist and non-Baptist women that there were places where they could use their God-given gifts. However, when Sehested was nominated in 1988 to deliver the sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention, the nominator was swiftly ruled out of order. In 1989 moderates suffered another setback when the Foreign Missions Board denied the appointments of Greg and Katrina Pennington to the mission field when their local association pointed out that she was ordained. But in 1991 moderates formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), a fringe organization of the SBC which welcomes women to participate in the worship services held when the CBF convenes. Some CBF churches allow their members to show their support for either the SBC or CBF by designating to which body their tithes are sent.
When I wrote about the Alliance of Baptists (formerly the Southern Baptist Alliance) and CBF, I had no personal connection to either body. Now I claim both as my Baptist home, and neither retains any tie to the SBC other than some shared history. The Alliance and CBF both fully welcome the ministerial gifts of women, and the Alliance is also fully committed to the inclusion of the LGTBQIA+ community in ministry. There are, of course, many other expressions of Baptist in addition to SBC, CBF, and the Alliance.