Conservative Baptist Association Origins: Events That Led to Creation of Church Coalition

The Conservative Baptist Association of America, known today as CBAmerica, was created in 1947, the result of decades of disagreement on the liberal direction the church was taking.

Issues like evolution in the 1920s pitted more conservative Baptists against those who were part of a movement for modernism, generally referred to as applying modern principles to traditional beliefs, according to CBNorthwest.

By the 1940s, a significant segment of the Northern Baptist Association was upset that missionaries were not following conservative tenets as they went about their work. In 1943, they founded the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, which today is known as WorldVenture.

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Here are five basic doctrines considered the fundamentals that were generally agreed upon until the modernism movement:

1.  The virgin birth of Christ
2. The inerrancy of the scriptures
3. The physical resurrection
4. A substitionary atonement
5. The imminent physical, second coming of Christ

"The application of  'scientific' analysis to the text of the Bible was eroding these key doctrines in leading theological seminaries and had affected the American Baptists as well," says Christianity.com.

The struggle between more conservative members of the American Baptists and those learning toward a more liberal approach finally in 1947 led to the creation of the Conservative Baptist Association.

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The new organization adopted a statement written in 1921 — that was rejected by the American Baptist churches —  as its manifesto in the 1940s.

"It was a separatist document. The Conservative Baptist Association even refused to merge with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches whose fundamentalist doctrines varied no more than a hair's-breadth from its own," says Christianity

By 1953, there were 500 churches in the association, according to CBMission Northeast. Today, 200,000 Baptists and 1,200 churches are part of the Conservative Baptists.

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