By Lance Wallace
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s officers and personnel committee have chosen former CBF moderator Pat Anderson of Florida to serve as the interim executive coordinator, beginning July 1.
Pat Anderson
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Anderson will assume the interim role as Daniel Vestal, CBF’s executive coordinator for the past 15 years, retires from the Fellowship on June 30.
“Pat is coming to us in a key time of transition, and his familiarity with CBF and proven commitment to the Fellowship made him the ideal person to fill this role,” said Keith Herron, the Fellowship’s moderator-elect and pastor of Holmeswood Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo.
“Our chief wish was to determine we weren’t going to sit still during this time,” Herron said. “We cannot afford to do so. We envision that Pat will begin to help us develop a methodology for putting together an orderly process of implementation when the 2012 Task Report is adopted.”
Anderson and his wife, Carolyn, have been involved in CBF from the inception of the movement. In 1989 they joined the unsuccessful effort to elect Daniel Vestal as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and in 1990 Pat was part of the initial movement to establish the CBF. In 1995 he was the national moderator of CBF, the year Cecil Sherman retired and Daniel Vestal was named coordinator.
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Florida was organized in the Anderson home in 1990, and Anderson served as coordinator until 2002 when he joined the national CBF as missions advocate. In that role, he has written and spoken on behalf of CBF missions and has taken small groups of pastors to hard places where CBF field personnel are working.
“I am very excited, and humbled, for the opportunity to help in the transition of CBF to new executive leadership,” Anderson said. “CBF has been the life work of Carolyn and me, and I look forward to working on behalf of everyone who loves Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.”
Vestal announced his retirement in September, Mercer University recently announced he will lead the university’s new Eula Mae and John Baugh Center for Baptist Leadership and serve as a distinguished professor beginning July 1.
Anderson will begin work at the Fellowship on June 15 in order to overlap with Vestal ensuring a smooth transition. An executive coordinator search committee, chaired by George Mason, pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, is currently receiving nominations from the Fellowship through e-mail at the address, CBFsearchcommittee@gmail.com“>CBFsearchcommittee@gmail.com.
The son of a Southern Baptist pastor-evangelist-director of missions, Anderson was born in Florida and earned a bachelor’s degree from Furman University, a master of divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctorate in criminology from Florida State University.
He has been a professor of criminology at Louisiana State University and at Florida Southern College, retiring as professor emeritus at Florida Southern in 2011. He has been a bi-vocational pastor and interim pastor in several churches.