Venture Church Network (formerly known as the Conservative Baptist Association of America) is a Christian association of churches in the United States with each local congregation being autonomous and responsible for their own way of functioning. History The first organization of Conservative Baptists was the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society (CBFMS), now called WorldVenture, formed in Chicago, in 1943. What became the Venture Church Network was organized in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1947 as the Conservative Baptist Association of America. The Conservative Baptist Association emerged as part of the continuing Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy within the Northern Baptist Convention. The forming churches were fundamentalist/conservative churches that had remained in cooperation with the Northern Baptist Convention after other churches had left, such as those that formed the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. At the 1946 NBC meeting, the old convention made it clear that it would not allow a competing missionary agency to operate within it. Churches withdrew, forming the new association, and hundreds of others withdrew in the following years. The conservatives were in the majority in Minnesota and Arizona, and the Northern Baptists lost those state agencies. The New Testament Association of Independent Churches and the Conservative Baptist Fellowship, which renamed itself the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship and is now the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International, split from the Conservative Baptists in the 1960s. On February 16, 2021 the association announced it was changing its name to Venture Church Network because the name Conservative Baptist “no longer connects with what it was originally intended to communicate”. Constituents The movement presently supports three national agencies - Venture Church Network, WorldVenture (formerly CBFMS, then CBInternational), and Missions Door (formerly Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society, then Mission To The Americas). These agencies have omitted the word "baptist" from their names, and it is notable that the four associated educational institutions listed below, likewise have omitted "baptist" from their names also. It appears that there has been a trend for some time to drop the name "baptist". Conservative Baptists cooperate with affiliated institutions of higher learning as well as youth and women's ministries. Each local Conservative Baptist church is an autonomous organization in voluntary affiliation with each other through regional associations. Reorganization Until a structural reorganization began in early 2004, Venture Church Network was a network of churches and ministries, committed to evangelization and church planting. In 2003, its membership comprised over 1200 churches representing