Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship belongs to the Baptist family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
The fellowship moderate Baptists built after losing the Southern Baptist Convention — denomination-like in function, and on principle refusing to be one.
Heritage
Formed in 1991 at Atlanta by moderate Baptists who concluded, after a twelve-year contest, that the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative resurgence was irreversible. Rather than found a rival convention, they organized a fellowship: a funding and missions channel for congregations that wanted historic Baptist freedoms — and women in ministry — without leaving Baptist identity behind. It gathered around new and partner seminaries and divinity schools and a Global Missions enterprise, with offices in Decatur, Georgia.
Theological family
Moderate Baptist: the four freedoms — Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom, religious freedom — held as the Baptist genius; believers' baptism; the priesthood of all believers taken to mean no creed may bind the conscience. Congregations range from centrist-evangelical to progressive, and CBF declines on principle to police the range.
Who decides what
Congregational to the bone: CBF has no authority over any church, ordains no one (its congregations ordain), and its General Assembly resolves little on purpose. State and regional CBF organizations mirror the light national structure.
What a first-time visitor would find
CBF congregations often look like classic moderate Baptist churches: robed choirs or blended worship, substantial expository preaching, believers' baptism, and frequently a woman in the pulpit — the fellowship's most visible distinctive in practice.
What it has always cared about
Women in ministry as a settled conviction; theological education, with partner schools founded across the South in the 1990s; missions focused on the marginalized and on long presence rather than quick counts; and the deliberate keeping of Baptist freedom as a living tradition.
Its gift to the wider church
Proof that the Baptist center held: when the largest Protestant denomination divided, CBF preserved a form of Baptist life — free, learned, women-affirming — that would otherwise have lost its institutional home, and it built the schools to sustain it.
Commonly confused with
With the Alliance of Baptists, the earlier and more progressive departure from the same controversy — the two overlap but differ in size and center of gravity. Also, because many CBF congregations never formally left the SBC, with the Southern Baptist Convention itself: dual alignment persists and confuses every directory, including ours.
Range of views inside it
Congregations differ on sexuality — CBF has lived through its own contested policies — on worship style, and on how much Baptist branding to carry; some churches are wholly CBF, many are dually aligned with a state convention or ABCUSA.
A note from the mapmakers: CBF is verified absent from RCMS 2020, so we publish no congregation count — and because dual alignment is common, no string in our data can cleanly separate a CBF congregation from an SBC one. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "CBF congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — who we are (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) · Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Rutgers University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Cooperative Baptist Fellowship churches are on the map
59 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregations appear on The Church Map, across 17 states.
- North Carolina — 12
- Kentucky — 6
- Virginia — 6
- Alabama — 5
- Georgia — 5
- Tennessee — 5
- Missouri — 4
- Texas — 3
- South Carolina — 3
- Illinois — 2