Before being appointed to the faculty, Professor Smith served Southern as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Fellow since 2002. He has been a church planter in Tennessee and a pastor in Tennessee and Kentucky, currently serving Watson Memorial Baptist Church. He is a conference preacher and has taken short-term missions trips to the Caribbean and Africa. He has been a Visiting Professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and an Instructor at Lee University. He is a member of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society of Church History.