Our Church History

In 1896, a small Sunday School class met in the farm community of Kelleytown, a rural crossroads about nine miles northeast of McDonough. The group soon agreed that a full-fledged church was needed at that location, and the Atlanta Presbytery responded by organizing a congregation and granting a charter on a first Sunday of January 1900. The first gathering place was a small, one-room schoolhouse, followed by a clapboard sanctuary completed by the end of the year.

For its first five decades, Kelley Church shared pastors with the Hemphill and Stockbridge Presbyterian Churches, and for the next forty years, a succession of part-time pastors, including seminars and retired pastors, served the church. In 1994, the Kelley congregation took a great step of faith by receiving their first full-time installed pastor, the Rev. Robert Merrill, followed in 2002 by the Rev. Dr. Robert P. Reno. The Rev. George Tatro is the current pastor of Kelley Church.

Since Kelley’s first year, the congregation has been the hub and the center of rural Kelleytown. All the activities of the area revolved around its modest facilities, and its members were known for their hospitality and concern for individuals in need. In 1950, an article in the Atlanta Constitution described Kelley as “one of the few landmarks in the state, for no strictly rural church in Georgia is credited with a more complete program for community service.”

At the beginning of Kelley’s second century, the congregation looks forward to serving the man new families and individuals moving to the Kelleytown community. But even in the midst of this new growth, Kelley will always remain a family-centered church, large enough to serve, and small enough to care!