A few weeks ago, I sat with a Baptist leader who described himself as a “moderate Baptist.” He meant it as a compliment, and most people in our circles would receive it that way.
After all, “moderate” is one of the most celebrated words in Baptist life. Institutions have been built around it; conferences, seminaries and networks have spent decades proudly embracing the label.
And yet I cannot stop thinking about it. Not because I disagree with the history behind the word. I don’t. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship exists because a group of Baptists decided moderation was not enough. That is the irony. The very movement that became synonymous with moderate Baptists was born from people who refused moderation.
Braxton Wade
When fundamentalists consolidated power within the Southern Baptist Convention, leaders like Daniel Vestal, Cecil Sherman, Molly Marshall and countless others took enormous risks. They challenged the status quo. They jeopardized careers. They walked away from power.
They dared to dream with God a Baptist future that made room for women, for theological freedom, for questions, for conscience. Nothing about that was moderate. That was radical. Not politically radical. It was gospel radical — the kind that believes God is bigger than our institutions and comfort is worth risking for conviction.
Which raises a question I cannot shake: If CBF was born from a radical act of courage, why are we still calling ourselves “moderates” 35 years later? And what exactly are we moderating?
Moderation is not a middle. It can be a hiding place. And the gospel never has had patience for people who hide.
“Much of moderate Baptist life has been built on comparison.”
Every time I hear the phrase “moderate Baptist,” I wonder whether we have confused being less conservative with being prophetic. They are not the same thing. Being less exclusionary than evangelicals is not liberation. Being more progressive than fundamentalism is not faithfulness. Much of moderate Baptist life has been built on comparison.
I have heard colleague after colleague say it: “We’re not those Baptists” or “We’re not that church.” And while that distinction may have been necessary in 1991, it is a terribly insufficient vision for 2026.
Movements cannot survive forever on what they oppose. Eventually they must define what they are for. And “moderate” Baptists have struggled to answer that with clarity. We champion women in ministry, mostly. We affirm racial justice, generally. We support LGBTQ people, sometimes. We welcome questions, to a point. We embrace diversity, as long as it isn’t too disruptive.
These are not abstractions. We have numbers and names.
CBF was born in part to liberate women and to liberate the pulpit. Thirty-five years later, according to Baptist Women in Ministry’s 2025 State of Women in Baptist Life report, only 142 of our congregations across the entire Fellowship have a woman as senior pastor or co-pastor. That’s only 10%. Our own executive coordinator, Paul Baxley, has admitted that such reports make “incredibly clear that there is far too much space between the convictions we profess and the reality that exists in our Fellowship.”
That space is the limit. That space is the moderation.
We affirm racial justice, generally. We invite Black preachers into our pulpits on the third Sunday of February and quote Dr. King in our newsletters. But count the senior pastors. Ask how many of our congregations — how many of our largest, our flagship, our most resourced congregations — have ever called a person of color to lead them. Not to preach a guest sermon. Not to direct a ministry. To lead. The answer is its own sermon.
“I wonder whether we have confused being less conservative with being prophetic.”
We support LGBTQ people, sometimes, and we have a name for the “sometimes.” In 2016, CBF launched what it called the Illumination Project, a study of the previous policy that barred LGBTQ Christians from serving as staff and missionaries. In 2018, the Fellowship announced a revised hiring policy that removed the discriminatory language. That sounded like progress. But the implementation procedure did what moderation always does: LGBTQ persons could now be hired — for some positions.
While CBF as a national organization has made more progress toward inclusion since then, many of our pastors and churches still struggle at this point and seek solutions they consider “moderate.”
And therein lies the problem. Moderation almost always has a limit. There is always a boundary, always a point where the institution becomes uncomfortable, always a moment when someone says, “You’ve gone too far.”
For decades, women heard that phrase, and many still do. So did Black clergy. LGBTQ Christians hear it every single day. The poor hear it whenever justice moves beyond the food pantry. Immigrants hear it whenever compassion collides with politics and ICE shows up in our neighborhoods.
Moderation sounds noble until you are the person standing outside its boundaries. Then it feels like delay. Then it feels like exclusion. Then it feels like being asked to wait while people debate your humanity. And history shows us who pays the price for moderation. It is rarely those with power. It is almost always those without it.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. His greatest frustration was not with the people who openly opposed civil rights but with the “moderates” — those who preferred order to justice, who agreed in theory but resisted action, who always needed more time. Moderation always has been better at creating comfort than at creating liberation. It asks what is reasonable; liberation asks what love requires.
I want to be honest: Liberation draws lines too. A Fellowship that truly lived into it would risk losing people who cannot follow it there. But where moderation draws its line around the comfortable, liberation draws it around the free.
And the more I read Scripture, the more convinced I am that Jesus was far more interested in liberation than moderation. His first sermon was not about balance. It was about freedom: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”
The gospel is not moderate. It is radical. It is extravagant, excessive in its love, liberal in that it is liberating.
Moderation says, “Let’s be careful.” Jesus says, “Love your enemies.”
Moderation asks, “Who belongs?” Jesus keeps expanding the table.
“I worry that we have spent 35 years celebrating the courage of our founders while growing increasingly uncomfortable with courage ourselves.”
The Samaritan woman, the Ethiopian eunuch, Nicodemus, tax collectors, fishermen and even Zacchaeus — people the religious establishment could not imagine centering became central to God’s story. God always is far less interested in protecting boundaries than religious people are.
Which brings me back to CBF. As this article is published, many of my colleagues, mentors and even my pastor are gathered in Jacksonville for CBF General Assembly. They are there because, like me, they love this Fellowship. This is not criticism from the outside. It is lament from the inside.
I worry that we have spent 35 years celebrating the courage of our founders while growing increasingly uncomfortable with courage ourselves. We honor the prophets who challenged exclusion in 1991 yet grow suspicious of the prophets who challenge it in 2026.
Would those who founded our movement want us remembered as moderate Baptists? Or as people who keep pushing toward freedom, toward justice, toward the ever-expanding dream of God?
The gospel does not call us to be moderate. It calls us to love recklessly, welcome extravagantly and pursue justice relentlessly — not because culture or politics requires it, but because the gospel leaves us no other option.
Courage in 2026 is not a memory to celebrate. It is a bill that has come due. It looks like saying the word “affirming” without an asterisk. It looks like calling a pastor whose skin or sexuality our institutions were built to exclude — and calling them to lead, not merely to serve. It looks like standing between ICE and our neighbors rather than issuing a statement after the vans are gone. It looks like naming the bullies in our government who terrorize the vulnerable and refusing the comfortable silence that calls itself prudence.
Because Jesus did not only expand the table. He also turned one over. When the house of God had been arranged to profit off the poor and the powerless, Jesus did not form a committee or call for more discernment. He flipped the tables and drove out what had turned the temple into a den of robbers.
Sometimes love builds a longer table. Sometimes love overturns the table that’s already there. A Fellowship that claims to follow Jesus does not get to keep only the gentle half of his ministry.
Are we willing to lay our hands on the tables in front of us? Thirty-five years ago, a group of Baptists risked everything to follow their convictions and follow a liberating Christ. Are we who have inherited their vision courageous enough to follow this liberating Christ?
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.
Related:
To understand today’s SBC, listen to history | Opinion by Braxton Wade
What is a moderate Baptist? | Opinion by Barry Howard
What does ‘moderate’ mean? | Opinion by Alan Sherouse
Why ‘moderate’ churches fear telling it like it is | Opinion by Eric Minton