Pastor, Evangelist and Church planter, Noel Clarke dies

The Christian community is in mourning over the death of well known Pentecostal Pastor, Noel Clarke, who died on Sunday, January 26, 2025. He was 74.

Pastor Clarke, founder of the Layou Miracle Church, was a former Governor General’s deputy and was known for his stance against Carnival. He was said to have been battling an illness and died while in the care of a local medical facility.

The Layou pastor, a member of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the West Indies ,SVG District, was a co-host of Encounter, a Christian programme aired weekly on SVGTV.

In February, 2007, this publication, in a piece on Pastor Clarke, commented, “Listen to Noel Clarke once, and you would never believe that the first time he preached he was so overcome with fear that he couldn’t finish the sermon.

“The scenario of a timid 17-year-old muffing a sermon on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a far cry from the little fire brand, bold faced, tell it as it is, preacher and church planter that this 56-year-old man has become.”

The article went on to state, “to mention the Pentecostal Assembly of the West Indies (PAWI) St Vincent and the Grenadines district without uttering his name will be an insult, because he has been in the heart of it all”.

In 1971 at the age of 20, Pastor Clarke left his well-paying job as a junior roads supervisor and journeyed to the West Indies School of Theology. He returned from Bible School in 1974.

“I remember a missionary came and spoke about God’s call on your life, and I went to the altar and couldn’t move for three hours. People went home and left me there praying even after church was over,” Clarke told SEARCHLIGHT back in 2007.

On return to SVG, he started giving leadership to a church at Mesopotamia, which he had helped to establish after a senior pastor had quit after backsliding, leaving the assembly broken.

When he left that church in 1982, the church was stable and started to take shape with 30 official members. He then went on to establish his church at Layou which is still around today with his son, Andrew, at the head.

In his life, Pastor Clarke went about establishing churches all over the country including the assemblies at South Rivers, Vermont, Pembroke and Bequia. He also established a church at Richland Park, but that was later combined with the Mesopotamia assembly which is now known as Kingdom Life Tabernacle.

Pastor Clarke has also served in almost every office that one could hold in PAWI, including that of District Bishop (Superintendent) for 11 years from 1985 to 1996. He has also been on the General Executive of the overall Caribbean fellowship of PAWI, and in the past has been called upon to help in times of church disputes, pastoral failure and other threats to an individual church.

Pastor Clarke has played many roles in the Christian community, among them Sunday School teacher, tele-evangelist, and deliverance minister. In 2019, he asked persons to realize that demons are real and told SEARCHLIGHT that he had cast demons out of people and places on several occasions.

At the time of his death, Pastor Noel Clarke had been married to his beloved Dawn for 48 years. The couple raised two children, Noelene and Andrew.