The Rev. Norvell Knight’s ministry took him from a tiny mission church in Cobb County to battle zones in Vietnam, an administrator’s job in the Pentagon, and to the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral.
Norvell Ernest Knight, 81, of Acworth, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, died Tuesday at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital of complications from pneumonia. His funeral will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Wildwood Baptist Church in Acworth. Entombment with full military honors will follow at Kennesaw Memorial Park. Collins Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Knight first felt a calling to the ministry as a teenage member of Kennesaw’s First Baptist Church, where he was ordained at age 18. A year later, he was drafted and served two years in Korea as a U.S. Army medical corpsman and several years in the Army reserves before resuming his schooling — first at Mercer University, then at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
In 1957 he became the first pastor of a fledgling Baptist mission in Acworth called Wildwood. His wife of 59 years, Betty Knight, said he spent three years building a congregation of 55 members before Wildwood was accorded status as a church by the Southern Baptist Convention. He later was pastor at Sardis Baptist Church in Canton and Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jonesboro before returning to military service, accepting an officer’s commission as a Navy chaplain.
He served 13 eventful months in Vietnam. Once, he escaped injury when a light plane in which he was riding had to make an emergency landing in a rice paddy. Later, he was injured while riding in a helicopter that was downed by enemy fire. He was treated for a broken arm at Yokusuka Naval Hospital in Japan.
Even noncombat assignments could be harrowing. While on duty at a European port city, he had to be transported by towline from one ship to another, five in all, to conduct five consecutive religious services. According to his brother, Charles Knight of Acworth, “The sailors told each other to pull like hell so their chaplain wouldn’t get wet.”
In the 1970s, Knight was chaplain on the USS Mount Whitney, a command-and-control vessel, and traversed the globe aboard it.
While assigned to the Pentagon in the late 1980s, directly under Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr., the Marine Corps commandant, Knight earned a master’s degree in ethical studies at Georgetown University. He also conducted periodic services, including funerals, at the Washington National Cathedral.
During the Desert Storm campaign in 1991 he was in charge of chaplains in the combat zone while serving as chaplain aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt supercarrier.
Later that year, he retired, but he still kept up a busy pastoral schedule.
“Norvell never turned down an opportunity to help someone or to preach the Gospel,” said the Rev. Tom Cocklereece of Marietta, former minister at Shady Grove Baptist Church. “As a pastor, Norvell was a perfect gentleman — a conservative evangelical with convictions who loved to laugh and never excluded anyone.”
The two of them presided together at a number of services, Cocklereece said, adding, “Norvell was a joy to work with.”
Survivors also include a daughter, Geneva Knight of Marietta; and three other brothers, Dewey Knight Jr. of Canton, James Knight of Acworth and Hugh Lee Knight of Kennesaw.
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