Before being appointed to the faculty, Professor Kevin L. Smith had 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 in Louisville. 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.