The foot soldiers of the 1770s who had fought and won the American Revolution were bereaved in 1799 when the news reached their towns and villages that their commander, George Washington, had died. Twenty or so years earlier they had followed his lead and, like the more-heralded founders of the Republic, had risked their own lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the cause of freedom. With the death of Washington, the rank and file patriots must have sensed the end of an era. The Republic would make it despite an attempt by the Mother Country to take it all back in 1812, but the great leader was gone.
Fred Anderson
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Cecil Edwin Sherman was one of the chief commanders of the Baptist revolution of the 1970s and beyond. He gave peace a fair chance and then resigned from the Peace Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention when he recognized its futility. He led the foot soldiers to organize a counter movement known as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and gave it some of the best years of his life. He continued to serve as prophet and preacher right up to the end, which came on April 17 at age 82. The foot soldiers among the moderates are bereaved.
His brother and fellow gospel proclaimer, Bill Sherman of Nashville, likened Cecil unto one of those Revolutionary War personalities. “John Parker said to his Minute Men at Lexington on April 19, 1775, ‘Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!’ Cecil stood his ground. He always told the truth. He fought against racial prejudice at great personal expense; and in the end, he won the battle. He stood his ground when it came to the women’s issue. The Scripture says that in Christ there is neither male nor female and Cecil was not silent on the role of women in the Kingdom. When the winds blew in the SBC, others ducked. He told the truth and in the end he was prophetic. He stood up for Baptist ideals. He stood his ground.”
As a student at Southwestern Seminary in the early 1950s, Cecil stood his ground. A classmate recalled Sherman standing in a dorm doorway listening to an impromptu discussion, sizing up the moment and the arguments and entering the fray in skilled debate form. The classmate said that he might join the weaker side; but before the discussion was spent, Sherman had won the argument. It was good training when decades later his very alma mater was among the institutions grabbed in a mammoth denominational power struggle.
From 1992-96, Sherman served as the first coordinator for the CBF; and by his own description, spoke “at assemblies and meetings here and there.” The “here and there” was literally every town big enough to have a stop light and more than one type of Baptist church. And “here and there” he had a word or two with U.S. presidents.
Cecil Sherman
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In 1996 he and his wife, Dorothy, became Virginia Baptists. He came to Richmond to teach at the CBF-affiliated free-standing seminary, BTSR; and in 14 years of teaching, he attracted a following of young seminarians for his classes, including courses on Baptist history. It is interesting that Cecil, while a theology student at Princeton, had used the collection of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society; and decades later at the end of a successful career, he was sending his own seminary students to use that same collection.
For 60 years Cecil Sherman was preacher and pastor. The résumé reads: Selfs Baptist Church, Honey Grove, Texas; Baptist students of Princeton; First Baptist Church, Chamblee, Ga.; and First Baptist Church, College Station, Texas. And there were the two prominent pastorates — First, Asheville, N.C., and the longtime flagship church, Broadway of Ft. Worth, Texas.
In coming to Virginia, Cecil Sherman made himself available. He served as interim pastor of 11 churches in the Richmond area. Some were large congregations but most were small and even rural. No church or gathering was too small for the great preacher. He kept an active speaking calendar right up to the end. Just days before his death, he spoke to a senior adult women’s class at First, Richmond, on the topic of “Doing When You Don’t Feel Good.” It was a topic from his own experience of late.
Of all his accomplishments and ministries, the most far-reaching and influential may have been his superb Sunday school lesson commentaries for Smyth & Helwys, the moderate Baptist publishing house.
In the pulpit, he was concise, quick and straight-to-the-point. He had his three points and he covered them with a mix of his droll and dry humor, his Southwestern twang and wit and his remarkable capacity for presenting theology in everyday language. He was not shy to speak the truth in love. In church life, he respected Baptist polity yet never minced his words with the deacons.
Jim Slatton, pastor emeritus of River Road Church, Richmond, where the Shermans were members, was a fellow Texan, a fellow freedom fighter and a friend — best friend — of Cecil Sherman. They became friends during the late unpleasantness in “the Convention” and Slatton wonders aloud, “How did Cecil make so many friends and so many enemies.”
“How did he remain as straight an arrow as ever lived and as funny and entertaining a person as I have ever been around. One businessman in Asheville said of him that Cecil was so straight that he made all the other preachers in town nervous. Yet he was no Pharisee, no sanctimonious stuffed shirt.
“There is the agonizing and gut-wrenching story of his march through the streets of Asheville with the black community and a few brave whites after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the fight in the Asheville church because he had the guts to say that the Church of Jesus Christ was not segregated. And there was his stand against the anti-intellectual movement to take Baptists back a hundred years. He was the stack pole and the rest of us stood up around him.”
Cecil Sherman taught his best pastoral lesson in the care of his own wife, who endured a long and gradual death from dementia. He chronicled that story as well as the stories of his career and the denominational schism in his engaging autobiography, By My Own Reckoning. They moved into a retirement community, with Dot in health care and Cecil in an apartment. He visited her daily, fed her meals, brushed her hair and talked lovingly to and about her. His second-best lesson was taught in his coping with his own terrible illness which required 20 rounds of chemo and doctor-imposed isolation. When strength returned, Cecil Sherman was right back where he wanted to be — at the writing desk and in the pulpit and standing his ground in any and every contest.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies, located on the campus of the University of Richmond. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.
Cecil Sherman