Clay Smith thrives as pastor of Georgia church following founding pastor

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Southwestern News.
When Bryant Wright concluded his time as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, 2010-12, and followed that service with a pastoral sabbatical, he began to create a plan alongside his fellow pastors of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church on how to find his successor as senior pastor.
Wright did not intend to immediately leave the mission he had founded with seven families in 1981, but he knew that time would come as the now several thousand-member church in Marietta, Georgia, grew and the time for a younger pastor approached.
When that time did come for Wright to step down, an alumnus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary found himself on the short list of those considered for the role, despite his hesitancy to lead a large church following the lengthy tenure of the founding pastor.
But in the fall of 2019, Clay Smith accepted that mission and for almost six years has led Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, shepherding the membership with a vision of discipleship.
Smith grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, where his father served as a worship leader and executive pastor of their church. But his father died when Smith was still in college, and while Smith first professed to be a Christian at 10 years old, he says he does not believe he made Jesus the center of his life until he was about 20 years old.
Smith attended law school at the University of South Carolina and had every intention of pursuing a career as an attorney, working his first job out of college for the lieutenant governor in South Carolina. But Smith also began volunteering at a student ministry on Sunday nights while attending a church in Columbia, and suddenly he found himself more interested in serving in ministry than in practicing law.
Despite his own father being in ministry, Smith had very little knowledge about what a call to ministry meant or how to act on that calling since joining the ministry had never been on his radar. To seek advice, he spoke to his pastor, a Southwesterner.
“I went to talk to him about ministry and how you know if you’re called,” Smith says. “And talked to a couple pastors, and he said, just go to seminary. I didn’t really know what a seminary was.”
Smith and his high school sweetheart Terrica, just after they married and honeymooned, packed a U-Haul and moved the 1,000 miles to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend Southwestern at the end of 2002. At that time, Smith admits he was going because of the encouragement of others even though he himself knew little about what it meant to be a Southern Baptist.
“I joke I was a Baptist by convenience,” Smith explains. “I graduated from Southwestern a Baptist by conviction.”
Those years at Southwestern were important to Smith as he learned foundational information for his faith while being equipped for ministry.
“Southwestern highlighted the role of equipping pastors in particular, I found that to be very helpful,” Smith says of the first thing that stood out about Southwestern. “Two, text-driven preaching has been informative to me, that’s what I try to do every week. And three, I think Southwestern’s commitment to the Great Commission, missions and evangelism being such an emphasis there, has been really formative to my ministry.”
Smith completed his Master of Divinity in the spring of 2005 and began praying about where he should go next, as opportunities presented themselves in South Carolina and in Georgia.
“For 10 years, I was an associate pastor at two different churches, and I did a variety of roles from missions ministry, education ministry, I did a number of things,” Smith says of his early years of ministry. “… That was kind of the theme of my first 10 years of ministry, I was like the utility guy. But I think in God’s providence, He was training me for a variety of things, too. So, when I was 35, I wanted to be leading a church.”
That first opportunity to be lead pastor came at First Baptist Church of Matthews in North Carolina, where Smith and his family with three daughters lived for five years.
Smith says that time in North Carolina was a blessing to the family, and they believed they would be there for a while, but then a series of events that had begun years before began to lead them to Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.
Clay Smith has pastored at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church since the end of 2019.
While he was still attending the University of South Carolina, Smith had a fraternity brother that he later learned was the son of Bryant Wright, founding pastor of Johnson Ferry. Smith recalls spending the night at his friend George’s house while in town for a wedding, not realizing that their host was the pastor of a large church.
Years later, Smith had an opportunity to connect with Wright when he was invited to join his mentorship group, where Wright invested in six young pastors at a time over a two-year span.
“He was forming a new group and he asked if I could be in it,” Smith says. “Actually, I turned him down because I had some other commitments, I just couldn’t commit to meet.”
But Wright followed up by inviting him to a second group of pastors, though he explained that they were pastors of larger churches than where Smith was pastoring at the time. But that opportunity continued to prepare Smith for where God would lead him next.
“The other five had all followed long-tenured pastors of larger churches, that was not my experience but that was theirs,” Smith says. “Again, that was a providence thing because, about that time, Bryant had announced his retirement. About three months later he called and just asked if I would pray about putting my name in for his successor.”
Wright says during the last several years of his role as pastor at Johnson Ferry, he began saving names of pastors that he believed the church should consider when the time came for him to retire. Smith’s name was on that list of more than 30 names that he presented to the elders and search committee of the church.
The church enlisted an outside company to go through the applicants and then recommend names to consider. That organization considered about 80 men and presented six to the church search committee. Smith was one of those remaining names.
Initially, Smith was hesitant.
“My first thought was, one, thank you, it was flattering; but two, thinking internally, ‘No way, I don’t want to follow the founding pastor,’” Smith says. But he heeded some advice from another person of significant influence in his life. “He said anytime a church calls you to that, you should at least have one conversation with them, because either God is going to open the door or, most of the time, it just confirms your call to where you are now.”
While Smith was sure the latter would occur, instead one conversation led to another, and he preached in view of a call in August of 2019 and was named the next pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.
Wright sat in on the interviews of the six applicants initially recommended, and says Smith was the final one interviewed.
“Within five minutes, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This is the guy,’” Wright says of the video interview, which left other members of the committee agreeing there was no doubt.
Bryan Hanson, who has been a member of Johnson Ferry for about 16 years and currently serves as executive pastor of global ministry, says there was some angst when he first heard Wright was going to transition out of his role. Hanson says he joined the church for its strong biblical teaching and focus on local and international missions, and he had concerns as to how the church culture could be impacted by the next pastor.
But Hanson says the congregation trusted the elders and leadership and that Smith has only increased those areas of the church since his arrival.
“One of the things I’ve grown to greatly appreciate about Clay is having a pastor that has a missional heartbeat for the nations and getting outside the walls of the church,” Hanson says. “And I would say we haven’t regressed at all. In fact, I’d say we’ve propelled forward under his leadership. So, I think it has served our church extremely well to see this continued vision and heart and passion to see the unreached reached and to see the nations reached for the Gospel.”
Wright knew the challenges Smith would face in becoming the pastor of a congregation that Wright had been shepherd over for 38 years. But in one of his first sermons to the church, Wright says Smith explained to the congregation that he was not there to fill Wright’s shoes, but his own according to God’s will. A statement that further proved to Wright that Smith was the one for the job.
To help create a smooth transition, Wright and Smith spent the first few months pastoring together, with Wright gradually handing over the reins of things such as meetings and other responsibilities.
Wright fully stepped down at the beginning of 2020, and within a few months Smith was leading the church through his first trial as pastor when the Covid pandemic impacted the world in March. But despite the difficulty of the circumstances, Smith says it actually cemented his position as shepherd of the congregation much more quickly than might have occurred through normal circumstances.
“In hindsight, fun was not the right word, but it was helpful,” Smith says. “They give you the title, but you really become the pastor when you shepherd people through crisis. Shepherding through a crisis like Covid made me become the pastor a lot quicker.”
Clay Smith came to Johnson Ferry Baptist Church with the goal of increasing unity and continuing to prioritize discipleship and evangelism.
Despite having to get to know his congregation with facemasks and practicing social distancing, Hanson says Smith did make efforts to meet church leaders and members and lead them through Covid as well as anyone could.
“I think Clay does as good a job as anybody, as far as staying focused on and fighting for unity of our team together, unity of the mission,” Hanson says. “And I think that has been a huge step forward for us. … I think we have definitely grown in that area.”
During his time in Matthews, Smith had decided to continue his seminary education at the encouragement of then-Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson, who had come to his church to preach.
“I prayed about it, and we just thought, you know what, I think we are going to start that,” Smith says of that decision to continue his education with Southwestern Seminary. “I love to learn. I think we’re in an age where we need to double-down on theological education. … I also want to have the credentials to play whatever role I can in the academy in addition to being a pastor.”
But with the move to Georgia, Smith spoke to his supervisor Matthew McKellar, Southwestern’s professor of preaching, and decided he would take a year off of his studies in preaching to focus on his new role. When it came time to continue his doctoral work, Smith admits it was hard for him to do so, recalling a comment someone shared with him that PhD work is not just a test of intellect, but a test of the will.
“I came very close to quitting,” Smith says. “… I had all the reasons why I was going to quit, I thought I didn’t have the time. I would not have graduated without Dr. McKellar’s help because he convinced me. He was super encouraging. He just has a pastor’s heart.”
With McKellar’s encouragement and guidance, Smith did continue and completed his education online, visiting Fort Worth once more for his graduation in December of 2024.
Smith says he discovered a love for academy that invigorated him and may one day lead him to teach in a classroom as he begins to think more about his desire to invest in the next generation of leaders. But his first love is leading the church, and he expects that will always take first place, though he would love to one day bring his gifts of pastoring and teaching together.
Currently at Johnson Ferry, Smith says the church is committed to making disciples, but also making sure the members are themselves disciple-makers, promoting a five-year vision to have 1,000 relational disciple-makers in the church. They also have goals of creating new campuses and sending more members as missionaries around the United States and the world.
“Clay has done wonderful,” Wright says of his successor, who he says has been a great cultural fit for the church. “He’s just an outstanding preacher, and he has been an outstanding leader, and he’s been very methodical. He didn’t come in and just try to make all kind of wholesale change.”
Hanson also says Smith allayed many concerns the congregation had when they faced finding a new pastor.
“I think statistically, those people that step in after that don’t do so well,” Hanson says of pastors who follow long-tenured pastors. “And I think it speaks to certainly his character, but also the fact that I see him behind closed doors and on the stage, and he’s the same person in both places. And he’s somebody that I trust. … I think God’s gifted him as a leader for sure, and so he had great attributes of a leader. But I think mostly his reliance on the Lord, and following the Lord’s will for him and for our church has been what has made this ultimately successful.”
Smith says he looks forward to continuing to serve Johnson Ferry and northwest Georgia.
“We have just loved being a part of Johnson Ferry,” Smith says. “Have loved being a part of what God’s doing here and are just so excited about so many things.”