Alliance of Baptists
Alliance of Baptists belongs to the Baptist family of churches.
Governance: association.
Organized 1987 by congregations departing the Southern Baptist Convention during its conservative resurgence — the earlier and more progressive of the two departures, alongside the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (1991).
Congregation count not yet source-verified against RCMS 2020; NULL rather than estimated.
The first organized departure from the Southern Baptist controversy — a small, deliberately progressive fellowship that chose freedom of conscience, ecumenical friendship, and women in the pulpit.
Heritage
Organized in 1987 as the Southern Baptist Alliance, by congregations and individuals leaving the Southern Baptist Convention in the early years of its conservative resurgence — the earlier and more progressive of the two departures, four years before the larger Cooperative Baptist Fellowship formed in 1991. It took its present title in 1992 and settled into being a covenant fellowship rather than a denomination: small on purpose, partnered widely, and unembarrassed about dissent as a Baptist birthright.
Theological family
Progressive Baptist: the historic Baptist freedoms — Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom, religious freedom — read in their most expansive register. The Alliance ordained and championed women in ministry from its founding and is openly welcoming and affirming of LGBTQ persons, positions it states as convictions rather than concessions. Many member congregations hold additional affiliations, so its theology runs from moderate to unambiguously progressive.
Who decides what
Congregational, with a light covenant structure above: an annual gathering, a small staff, and a board, none of which can direct a congregation. Churches and individuals both belong, which is itself unusual among Baptist bodies.
What a first-time visitor would find
There is no Alliance liturgy; member congregations shape their own worship. A visitor will often find thoughtful moderate-Baptist worship — hymns old and new, Scripture read at length, a substantial sermon — and in some congregations lectionary readings and practices borrowed from ecumenical partners.
What it has always cared about
Dissent honored as a Baptist inheritance; the ordination and full leadership of women; ecumenical partnership, including a formal relationship with the United Church of Christ and a decades-long friendship with the Fraternity of Baptist Churches of Cuba; and justice work carried on as ordinary church business.
Its gift to the wider church
A living demonstration that the Baptist heritage of liberty can travel left as authentically as it travels right — the Alliance kept a progressive Baptist witness alive and organized when the word Baptist was assumed to mean only one thing.
Commonly confused with
With the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — the later, larger, more centrist departure from the same controversy; the two overlap in congregations and cooperate without merging. Also with American Baptist Churches USA, the older northern body with which many Alliance congregations are dually aligned.
Range of views inside it
Congregations range from moderate churches that simply wanted out of a fight to fully progressive congregations; dual affiliations with ABCUSA, CBF, and the UCC are common, and each congregation decides its own alignments.
A note from the mapmakers: Our data source publishes no congregation count for the Alliance, and we make none up. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation — least of all its position on contested questions, which the Alliance itself declines to impose. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Alliance congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Alliance of Baptists — our history and covenant (Alliance of Baptists) · Baptists in America: A History (Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins, Oxford University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)