HOUSTON (ABP) -- This summer marked the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Southern Baptist Convention's "conservative resurgence" -- a movement by strident fundamentalists to rescue a denomination they viewed as going astray.

Eighteen years ago many of the old denominational loyalists, theological moderates and social liberals surrendered in the SBC holy war and re-convened in a quasi-denominational small-"s" southern Baptist network called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Both groups met recently -- the SBC June 23-24 in Louisville, Ky., and the CBF a week later in Houston.

Younger Southern Baptists came to Louisville in large numbers and with knives drawn. While reared under conservative SBC dogma, some appear on the brink of walking away from a convention structure they view as increasingly irrelevant to the lives of their churches and ministries. Some denominational leaders went out of their way to engage them. Others challenged their critique -- suggesting interesting days lie ahead in SBC politics.

In Houston among the Cooperative Baptists, the picture was more nuanced. Attendance was about 20 percent below last year's CBF General Assembly in Memphis (the same percentage, incidentally, by which giving to CBF lags behind this year's budget). CBF officials expected the attendance drop, however, and attributed it largely to an unusual meeting schedule that overlapped with the July 4 weekend.

It was also a much-younger-than-usual CBF crowd. Terry Hamrick, a CBF official who for many years has conducted a pre-General Assembly leadership training for clergy, said for the first time this year attendees from the 15 partner theology schools associated with the CBF outnumbered attendees educated in SBC seminaries prior to the 1990s.

Overall the mood in Houston was much more congenial than in Louisville, notwithstanding a blog-and-Twitter fueled mini-controversy over CBF leadership's refusal to hold a workshop on the church's response to homosexuality. The same subject created some discomfort when the CBF Coordinating Council adopted an organizational value welcoming but not affirming of gays in 2000.

That is not to say all is well in the CBF fold. After the closing session July 3, CBF leaders invited young laity to a late-night "listening session" -- although the crowd that gathered turned out to be predominantly clergy.

Some of the comments noted real progress toward the stated commitment to honor race, gender and generational diversity in all areas of CBF life. Others, however, bemoaned many CBF supporters' lingering "bitterness" toward former adversaries in the SBC struggle. Some -- through tears -- voiced honest doubt the CBF would ever be able to look forward instead of backward.

That kind of passion makes it is hard to imagine that younger leaders are going anywhere any time soon, but it does suggest the CBF still has growing pains.

The younger generation in CBF wishes their elders would "get over" the SBC controversy -- probably an unrealistic expectation. Despite frequent protestations that they no longer care about the SBC, many first-generation CBFers probably won't be able to get over losing their spiritual birthright any more than a child can get over it when her parents divorce.

The challenge for the older generation of CBF is not to get over the SBC, but to not let it define the organization. They want the younger generation to recognize that the new moderate institutions that now benefit them did not come into existence merely by chance, but were the result of toil and sacrifice. Younger CBFers know that, but say hearing about it constantly is about as satisfying as when a parent begins a lecture with the phrase, "When I was your age...."

Young CBFers share some common traits with their counterparts in the SBC. They care about the poor and are attracted to hands-on ministries that respond in small and practical ways to large problems. CBF in recent years has rallied around the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals to fight global poverty. Younger SBCers, meanwhile, have bucked their denomination's system to speak out on global warming, a problem they believe will disproportionately hurt the poor.

Both prefer to learn through conversation and dialogue about varying points of view rather than listening to lectures by an older expert with a Ph.D. They seek to engage culture, rather than to re-create a subculture that seeks either to dominate the broader society or wall itself off from the culture at large.

There are important differences, however. The younger SBC crowd, for example, is quite comfortable with the "complementarian" view, that men and women are created equal in God's eyes but for different leadership roles in the church and home. From the beginning, CBF has maintained that males and females are equally qualified to whatever ministry God calls them, though only recently has that translated into many CBF congregations reaching the point where they would seriously consider calling a woman as pastor.

Younger participants in the CBF and SBC are like first cousins who may not know each other personally, but travel parallel paths on different branches of the same family tree.

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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

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