Retiring Cooperative Baptist Fellowship head Daniel Vestal to lead new Mercer University Baptist leadership center

Retiring Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Executive Coordinator Daniel Vestal has been named to lead Mercer University’s new Eula Mae and John Baugh Center for Baptist Leadership. Vestal, 67, will begin the new role July 1, the day after he retires as head of the Atlanta-based CBF, where he has served since 1996.

The center is endowed by a $2.5 million grant from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation. John Baugh, a Baptist layman and generous donor to moderate Baptist causes, founded Sysco Corporation in 1969. The company is now North America’s leading foodservice marketer and distributor, with $30.3 billion in annual sales and 47,500 employees. Baugh died in 2007 at age 91.

Mercer President William Underwood announced Vestal’s appointment Feb. 8. “I can think of no two names more synonymous with Baptist leadership than John Baugh and Daniel Vestal,” Underwood said. He described Baugh as a layperson who “provided courageous and principled leadership” for many decades, and Vestal as having provided the same kind of leadership to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship for more than 15 years. Vestal said he was honored by the appointment and by the foundation’s generosity. “Eula Mae and John Baugh embodied integrity and Christian character,” he said.

The Baugh Center will foster research and learning in Baptist history, theology, ethics and missions. It will partner with Mercer’s James and Carolyn McAfee School of Theology, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the American Baptist Historical Society, Mercer’s Center for Theology and Public Life, and other organizations and programs. The center plans to start a doctoral program in religion focused on Baptist studies. It will be interdepartmental, drawing on faculty from across the university and visiting scholars, and Vestal will teach as a distinguished university professor.

Before becoming CBF coordinator, Vestal served five years as pastor of Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston. He also pastored Dunwoody Baptist Church in Atlanta, First Baptist Church of Midland, Texas, Southcliff Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and Meadow Lane Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. After an unsuccessful run for president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1990, he convened a gathering of moderates frustrated with a decade of denominational politics. That meeting led to the formation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which upholds values including academic freedom in seminaries, women in ministry, local-church autonomy, and the separation of church and state.

The Baugh Foundation has supported numerous moderate Baptist causes, including Associated Baptist Press. Recent major gifts include $2 million for the Baugh-Marshall Chapel at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, dedicated in 2011. A 2007 matching-gift challenge helped the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty raise nearly $1.2 million in a couple of weeks. Foundation funds also helped make possible the Celebrating Grace hymnal, unveiled in March 2010. Integrity in giving and business, as Vestal described the Baughs, reflects the honest weights the book of Proverbs commends (Proverbs 11:1).

In April 2010, the foundation sponsored a retreat for leaders of more than 20 CBF-affiliated organizations, held on the occasion of the network’s 20th anniversary to consider its future. One outcome was a CBF 2012 Task Force led by Alabama pastor David Hull. The task force gathered input in more than 100 listening sessions during a two-year study and is expected to present a final report at the CBF General Assembly, scheduled for June 20-23 in Fort Worth, Texas.

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