Noel was previously stationed at Avondale, Warkworth, and Sandringham, and before that in Wales, after having originally trained for ministry in Auckland. He combines his duties at St Thomas with the position of Port Chaplain for The Mission to Seafarers Society (Auckland). He is also the Regional Chaplain, Northern Region, for Hato Hone St John, responsible for some 30 chaplains in the northern part of the North Island.
 

He was previously a senior legal academic (Auckland University of Technology, and Aberystwyth University, where he was Professor of Law, and Head of the Department of Law and Criminology), and also a barrister (Inner Temple, and New Zealand). He is the author of a number of chapters, articles (published in such journals as Churchman, Law and Justice, Journal of Anglican Studies, Journal of Law and Religion, Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, and the Ecclesiastical Law Journal), and books (including Church and State in the Post-Colonial Era: The Anglican Church and the Constitution in New Zealand (Polygraphia (NZ) Ltd, Auckland, 2008), Priest of the Church or priest of a church: the ecclesiology of ordained local ministry (Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2021), and The Coronation and the Constitution (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2025).

 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of The Guild of Church Musicians, and was formerly a Distinguished Academic Associate of the Centre for Law and Religion. He is President of The Royal Commonwealth Society Auckland Branch. 
 

Noel does not sit comfortably within current ecclesial fashions. That is not accidental. His academic work presupposes that institutions have meaning prior to reform agendas and that authority is something received, not engineered. He is Anglican in location, catholic in ontology, common and civil law in method, and sacramental in imagination.

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In more technical terms, his work approaches law, theology, and ecclesiology through historically grounded institutional analysis rather than abstract normativity or functional design. He treats constitutional and ecclesial authority as constituted through inherited forms, practices, and rituals that are legally and theologically effective rather than merely symbolic. Methodologically, he works within a tradition shaped by natural reason as received through history, emphasising continuity, juridical structure, and liturgical practice as sources of legitimacy and meaning. Theologically, he adopts a liturgical and pneumatological realism, attentive to lex orandi as a bearer of implicit doctrine, while resisting both mechanistic sacramentalism and pragmatic reconfiguration. Across disciplines, his approach is anti-reductionist, anti-teleological, and committed to understanding institutions as they have been received, ordered, and sustained over time. He uphold classical Anglican catholic constitutionalism.

 

Noel is married to Katy, and they have a son, Christopher, a small dog, Teddy, and a cat, Clara, who rules them all.