By PEG MCNICHOL | pmcnichol@medianewsgroup.com

October 23, 2024

Originally Published: The Oakland Press
Client: Grace Centers of Hope

You won’t find the word “retirement” in the Bible, according to Pamela Clark. That’s what she tells people about the change in leadership at Grace Centers of Hope and Grace Gospel Fellowship.
 

Her husband, the Rev. Kent Clark, told his congregation Sunday he’s moving to emeritus status as lead pastor and stepping down as Grace Centers’ CEO and president. He’ll be 80 on Thursday. Pamela Clark, 75, is leaving her job as Grace Centers’ director of women’s and children’s programs.

They’ll continue working three days a week with their successors: the Rev. Darin Weiss and his wife, Amber, the Clarks’ son-in-law and daughter.

Clark, son of a pastor, felt called to the ministry before he graduated from Lincoln High School in Warren, where he was a member of the football team. He attended Georgetown College and Lexington Baptist College in Kentucky before returning to Michigan.

He started the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Sterling Heights in October 1979. A year later, the Clarks moved the church to Pontiac and renamed it Grace Gospel Fellowship.

Friends warned that a white pastor couldn’t build a church in the majority Black community in 1980 because it wouldn’t survive what was then an aggressive drug culture, he said.

“Pontiac was a rough city at the time,” Clark said “We’d let people working here, especially females, go home around 4 p.m., before it got dark. Pontiac has come a long way since then.”

What happened next led them to create Grace Centers of Hope, now an $8 million-a-year operation dedicated to tackling the root causes of homelessness by rehabilitating people with addiction, mental illness and other traumas.

“I was asked to be on the Pontiac Rescue Mission’s board. When we lost our executive director in 1994, the board asked me to take over,” he said.

City officials were initially unhappy the mission was expanding, which led to a 5 a.m. police raid of the women’s dorm, an old converted post office at 35 Huron St.

They later apologized, he said, and soon started to see the changes as the mission converted to Grace Centers of Hope.

“We’ve seen tremendous things happen here. I think miracles happen in Pontiac,” Clark said.

He and Pamela started more than a church. They had two daughters, Amber and Shannon, a former Miss Michigan.

Like her mother, Amber is a licensed therapist. She has worked at Grace Centers since 2004.

“I have always wanted to become a counselor since I was in middle school,” Amber Weiss said. “When I was around 11, I attended a ‘stress group’ in middle school with some other girls. That group was run by the school social worker, and I instantly knew that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up.”

Weiss said she’s learned from her mom that the first goal is to let everyone walking through the door know they’re safe, welcomed and loved. Her dad taught her that “serving others is more important than anything else that you could gain,” she said.

The Weisses have youth and strength while the Clarks have the kind of wisdom gained by decades of experience, Pamela Clark said.

Read the full article here.