HOUSTON (ABP) — Associated Baptist Press has paid homage to moderate Baptist pioneer Cecil Sherman even as the veteran of Baptist internal fighting faces a different sort of battle.
ABP board member Marv Knox presented Sherman with the news agency’s Religious Freedom Award Sept. 10.
Although usually presented at a banquet in conjunction with an ABP directors’ meeting, the award was given to Sherman in his room at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he is undergoing treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of cancer.
The struggle against the deadly disease is one of many challenges he has met in his 80 years.
Jackie Moore, who chairs the ABP board’s awards committee and accompanied Knox to Houston, said directors had decided long ago to present the award to Sherman for his defense of religious freedom and freedom of the press. But his hospitalization caused them to expedite the event, in hopes that Sherman would be in good enough health by ABP’s April board meeting to be honored with the traditional banquet tribute.
“Several on our board suggested that we present it to him now as a way of expressing our love and encouragement to a true hero of our Baptist faith,” she said, in a Sept. 24 e-mail message. “So many of those giants of the faith have gone on to heaven, and I believe we had a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us in that hospital room and joining us in celebrating this faithful servant. Dr. Sherman has spent a lifetime loving people through his pastoral ministry, his writing and his legacy of truth even when it meant personal sacrifice.”
Sherman, a prominent figure in moderate Baptist life over the last half-century, served as the first national coordinator — or chief executive — of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. He helped shape the moderate organization, founded in 1991 after fundamentalists wrested control of the Southern Baptist Convention from their more theologically centrist brethren.
Sherman is renowned for going toe-to-toe with fundamentalist Adrian Rogers during theological debates when both served on the SBC Peace Committee in the mid-1980s. The panel worked — ultimately unsuccessfully — to resolve the moderate-conservative dispute that had dissolved into open conflict within the denomination in 1979.
“This award allows me to join a company of extraordinary Baptists, and I am honored to be in their company,” he said, in a statement conveyed by his daughter, Eugenia Brown. “For Marv Knox to fly to Houston to make this presentation was an extraordinary kindness. I am grateful to the directors of ABP for this honor.”
Knox, editor of the Texas Baptist Standard, wrote a column describing the presentation in Sherman’s hospital room as a moment in which he felt as though he was “on holy ground.”
“Cecil is a living legend among Baptists,” Knox said, in a telephone interview Sept. 23. “And he’s embodied in his life and in his ministry … the ideals of this award and, really, what ABP stands for in terms of religious freedom.”
ABP “seeks to promote religious freedom … at its founding and throughout the years and has sought to tell people the truth about issues of faith and life and particularly the Baptist denomination, and Cecil was certainly a role model for all of us, even though he was not a journalist,” Knox continued. “He was a pastor and a denominational leader and now an elder statesman. And he was always courageous to speak the truth. And we all appreciate what he’s done to not take freedom lightly, but to value it and treasure it and pass it along to future generations by being a good steward.”
Before helping found CBF, Sherman served as pastor of several prominent congregations, including Broadway Baptist Church in his native Fort Worth, Texas, and First Baptist Church in Asheville, N.C. After retiring from CBF in 1996, he served as a professor and interim pastor. He was teaching at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Va., and serving as pastor of Westover Baptist Church in Richmond, when doctors discovered his leukemia.
Sherman’s wife, Dot, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease several years ago. She died Aug. 1.
Brown said Sept. 24 that her father was discharged from M.D. Anderson Sept. 22 and that his prognosis was much better than when his cancer was initially diagnosed. Sherman has been undergoing experimental drug treatments at the hospital, which is highly regarded for cutting-edge cancer research.
“In July, he was given about 3 months to live,” she said. “But now, as he has responded so well to the chemo, the docs clearly think that he will live a good bit longer than that.”
Sherman now lives in an apartment provided by Houston’s South Main Baptist Church. Brown, who lives in Madison, Wis., has been caring for him with the help of family friends. If his condition continues to improve, she noted, he may move back to Richmond.
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