By David Wilkinson
Cecil Sherman has rightly been remembered this past week as a leader who spoke the truth and stood by his convictions. I admired him for those and other qualities as well. But I am particularly grateful for his wise counsel about love: Love God. Love your wife. Love the church.
The Baptist icon who died April 17 at 82 after a massive heart attack was 27 years my senior when I joined the small staff of the fledgling Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Atlanta in 1993. We were from different generations, and that sometimes led to debate over the most effective ways for CBF to organize around its mission. But in things that mattered most, Cecil was light-years ahead of me.
I might not have guessed that would be the case a few months earlier, when the doorbell rang at our house in Louisville, Ky. I had begun a conversation with a committee of CBF’s Coordinating Council about the newly approved position of communications coordinator. Cecil had called to say he was going to be in town and would like the opportunity to get acquainted.
Melanie opened the door. Standing on our front porch was a tall, wiry, older gentleman who looked rather distinguished — from the neck up. From the neck down, he was decked out in a long-sleeve white dress shirt with the tails hanging over bright plaid shorts. Bony knees protruded above long black dress socks that descended into polished black dress shoes.
“You … must … be … Melanie,” said the gentleman in his never-hurried Texas accent. Years later, Melanie would still chuckle with the memory of her first encounter with Cecil, dressed in his “traveling clothes” after speaking somewhere earlier in the day. But she recalled the warm smile and the sparkle in his eyes as much as his unusual attire.
I worked with Cecil for three brief years until he retired as CBF’s first chief executive, having begun that work at age 64. This was his three-fold lesson on love:
Love God. Cecil did, fully and wholeheartedly. Loving God and loving neighbor were integrated in his life, his theology and his ministry. Better than most of us who talk a good game about Christian values, Cecil put first things first. Everything else flowed from the priority of his relationship with God through Christ.
Love your wife. I lived with Cecil and Dot in their townhouse in Atlanta for about seven weeks before Melanie and the kids moved to Atlanta. I ate breakfast with them every morning, and it was abundantly and wonderfully clear that I was dining with a couple who were still deeply in love. Cecil adored Dot. I think the way he smiled when he spoke her name had to make God smile, too.
They met in Fort Worth, Texas, when he was a theology student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Ten years his elder, Dot Hair resisted Cecil’s repeated overtures about marriage until, he said, “I caught her at a weak moment one day.” They had been married 54 years when Dot passed away. I don’t know if Cecil loved Dot from the moment he saw her. But I do know that he loved her to the end with a tenderness and grace that was inspiring and humbling to witness. As her health failed and her memory was cruelly savaged by Alzheimer’s disease, Cecil lovingly cared for her with never a hint of complaint.
Love the church. Cecil, with his younger siblings Ruth and Bill, grew up two-and-a-half blocks from Polytechnic Baptist Church in Fort Worth. The Shermans were there every time the doors were open. In a way, that’s the farthest Cecil ever lived from the church, because every year of his three decades as a pastor the church grew closer to his heart.
It’s easy to love the Church universal or the church in the abstract. But Cecil loved the congregations he served, warts and all. He loved the church even when it didn’t see things his way, even when it frustrated him, even when it resisted directions he wanted to go or turned down ideas he felt strongly about. He preached, pastored and persevered without bitterness because he loved God’s people, and he loved being their pastor.
As you have probably surmised, Cecil never voiced these lessons on love to me, at least not in so many words. He never had to. His advice came in the best form possible — his life. For that, I will forever be grateful.