EP 49 – Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad Walk Into a Bar… with Rev. Dave Carpenter

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 1 of 13

Rev David Carpenter (00:00):

I used to say, when people would ask me why our young people aren’t coming to church, I used to say they’re running as fast as they can away from the church because they view us as archaic and judgmental and hypocritical and out of touch. But now I say they’re running as fast as they can because we are hypocritical and judgmental and archaic and out of touch. 

Music Intro: I want you to feel, I want you to feel, something crazy crazy amazing.

Katrina Carlson (00:29):

Hello. Crazy amazing humans. Welcome to another episode where we celebrate the incredible people who use their time, talent, and resources to make the world a better place. I’m your host Katrina Carlson, and I am so glad you’re joining us today.

Jefferson Denim (00:49):

And I’m Jefferson Denim. Our guest today is Reverend David Carpenter, the senior pastor at Brentwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, a leader who brings people together through faith, service, and compassion. Reverend Carpenter earned his master of divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary and has been serving a senior pastor at Brentwood Presbyterian Church since 2009, and now he’s finishing his doctoral thesis at Duke Divinity School.

Katrina Carlson (01:16):

That is very impressive. And I’ll just mention also that he serves on the board of directors of the Medical Benevolence Foundation, the African enterprise, and has served on the Newton Presbytery’s Nairobi Partnership Committee amongst other boards and committees that he has been on and is on. Reverend Carpenter also mentors, pastors and does church consultation both nationally and internationally. He’s worked with numerous reconciliation organizations, say that three times in countries such as South 

Africa, Croatia, Northern Ireland, and Israel Palestine. So, okay. Do I call you Reverend Carpenter or Pastor Dave, or what should we call you?

Rev. David Carpenter (01:59):

I try to get my family to call me his most holy eminence. It doesn’t work. So Dave is great,

Katrina Carlson (02:05):

Dave. Okay. Okay, Reverend,

Jefferson Denim (02:08):

I have a quick question. When you get your master of divinity, does that mean you can levitate now or what happens? 

Rev. David Carpenter (02:14):

Yeah, actually I walk on water and it’s pretty cool.

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 2 of 13

Katrina Carlson (02:17):

Well, I’m impressed by it all. So Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Rev. David Carpenter (02:20):

Thank you.

Katrina Carlson (02:21):

Thank you so much for being here.

Rev. David Carpenter (02:22):

Well, I love you all. I love what you’re doing here. I’m very intimidated to be here with such amazing people that you, as soon as I saw Tom Catena on there.

Katrina Carlson (02:33):

Oh, I know Tom, Dr. Tom, he’s amazing. Well, you’re right up there. We are so grateful to have you here. Absolutely. You are crazy amazing. So, okay, let’s start a little bit at the beginning so we can familiarize our audience with you. What first drew you to ministry?

Rev. David Carpenter (02:48):

Yeah, I was born in the Presbyterian church and baptized in the Presbyterian church. And then when I was in third grade, my mom became Unitarian. So I was Unitarian until eighth grade when went back to the church, not for any deep theological reasons, but because they had a great youth program there. And then in ninth grade I had one of those typical experiences. We had a young life speaker on a weekend 

retreat and we were invited to go out onto the hillside on Saturday night after the talk and try to pray to God. And I remember thinking, God, if you’re there, just somehow let me know. And getting these chills up and down my spine and feeling like I was floating three feet off the ground and hearing this voice in the back of my mind saying, Dave, I’ve been here all along, just waiting for you to notice. And

Rev. David Carpenter (03:38):

That changed my life, changed my direction in life. At that point I was planning on becoming a doctor, and so I went off to Tufts to study pre-med, but during, in my sophomore year, a number of things happened that made me feel really strongly I was being called into the ministry.

Jefferson Denim (03:53):

So you’re, were going to be a doctor. I’ve got this boil I’d like you to look at after the podcast. I love hopping those things. So Katrina and I obviously are very aware of Brentwood Presbyterian Church, a view of B-P-C, and we both played music there. We’ve attended services there. We’ve both been members.

Katrina Carlson (04:12):

Our kids met there in preschool,

Jefferson Denim (04:14):

Right?

Katrina Carlson (04:15):

Yes. Our kids, our babies met. Yeah, that’s how we met. That’s how we met. So

Jefferson Denim (04:21):

We know personally that my kids went there too.

Katrina Carlson (04:23):

Yes. Your kids, you basically raised them there as well.

Jefferson Denim (04:26):

So we know that BPC has a reputation for being a welcoming and inclusive community. So what’s your approach to making sure people feel from all walks of life that they feel at home there?

Rev. David Carpenter (04:40):

Yeah, I guess I would say that one of the things we say often is wherever you are or aren’t on your spiritual walk, there is a place for you here. And I think probably at the heart of it is just being really, really clear that this is not our church. This is not the Presbyterian’s church, this isn’t the Christ’s church, this is God’s church. And so I think if you start from that point of view, then it changes the way that you welcome whoever walks through the doors. And I think it’s been a long tradition at BPC to be sort of that kind of open and welcoming. And so we tend to have a lot of married couples who are Jewish and Christian or Catholic and Protestant or agnostics atheists. I think we try to specialize in asking the 

deep questions and giving people a lot of freedom to figure it out for themselves. We teach a very orthodox kind of mainstream Christianity, but we’re very clear that we want anyone who’s interested in hearing what that’s all about to come along for the ride.

Katrina Carlson (05:46):

That’s amazing. And that is definitely what I feel when I go there too. And so now going into these organized faith communities that you’re talking about, and so in our country we’ve obviously seen a real fall off in membership and attendance in the last years. So we know, for instance, let’s say the mainline traditional churches have been particularly impacted. Do you have any thoughts on why this is happening?

Rev. David Carpenter (06:09):

Yes, lots of you would. Lots of us talk about it. Lots of people are writing about it. I think it’s not just one thing. I think there’s a lot of things going on. I think our society is growing more secular and scientific. We’ve seen kind of similar things happening in Europe where people have not been going to church, they’ve sort of predated us, but now we’re catching up very quickly. And I think the mistake there is that the more we understand how things work, it doesn’t really say anything about why they work, but I think a lot of people think that as we get to know more about how things work, that there isn’t room for God or 

there isn’t a need for God. And then I think globalization is a huge piece of it. I think as the world gets smaller and smaller and we become more interconnected, we’re no longer in our little tribes, whether it’s Christian or Muslim or Jewish or other faiths or no faith and different cultures.

(07:06):

My kids now are friends with people of all different faiths and all different viewpoints. And I think as the world gets more interconnected like that where we realize that we need to expand our horizon. So I think there’s that. But a huge piece that I feel very strongly about is that I think that church has, in many ways, we have a lot of work to do. I think that we have, I used to say when people would ask me why our young people aren’t coming to church, I used to say they’re running as fast as they can away from the church 

because they view us as archaic and judgmental and hypocritical and out of touch. But now I say they’re running as fast as they can because we are hypocritical and judgmental and archaic and out of touch. And I think that the church has a lot of work that they need to do to be more like the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think I’ve always said, I think the church has always been sort of 50% about the radical revolutionary gospel of Jesus Christ and 50% about indoctrinating the values and norms of our society.

(08:23):

And we’ve got to learn to peel apart that onion. I’ve always said that if we were really living our lives the way Jesus talked about in the gospels, we would have the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security up in our balcony every Sunday to try to keep tabs on what we were doing because it really, if you focus on what Jesus was saying and what Jesus was teaching, it’s very different from the direction that many churches as particularly right now are going. 

Katrina Carlson (08:54):

Well said. Well, that is very interesting you bring that up because I was also wondering that flip side maybe where there feels like there’s a galvanization of a sect of Christianity, kind of Christianity prevalent in the political discourse and trying to impose a kind of authoritarianism or I don’t know what, I don’t, something with religion there to justify their actions or persuade people. But what are your thoughts on 

that idea?

Rev. David Carpenter (09:18):

Yeah, I mean this whole idea of Christian nationalism is very scary and very worrying. Gallup came out with a poll recently that said people who self view themselves as evangelicals are less likely now to read the Bible, to know what Jesus says to go to church or to pray. And it’s sort of been co-opted by political cultural movement that really has very little to do with what Jesus teaches about and came to, I mean, you think about it, this is a person who spoke out against the imperialistic Roman empire, was always speaking about justice and including those on the margins and helping the poor. And yet then after Constantine, we sort of flipped the script. And since then there’s been, which is what we’re going to be talking about, this very individualistic focus and tribalistic focus and xenophobic focus.

Jefferson Denim (10:30):

And he spoke out against religious leaders too in his day who are corrupting to your question, Katrina, let’s say the Christian nationalists of his day using religion as a club. That’s right. Alright, so we know you’re writing a thesis and you’re alluding to this for the doctoral program you’re doing at Duke. It’s focused on an unusual word. We love this word and maybe you can help us pronounce it, but could you elaborate on that and tell us a bit more about your thesis?

Rev. David Carpenter (11:02):

Sure. The thesis title is Archbishop Desmond tutu’s imago de infused Ubuntu as the hermeneutical antidote to the rise of toxic individuality in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Jefferson Denim (11:21):

Okay, so pretend I never went, pretend I never went to divinity school. Which word was the hard one? I know which one? Tu, how do you pronounce it? Ubuntu. Ubuntu. Alright, so talk about

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 5 of 13

Rev. David Carpenter (11:37):

Ubuntu. Alright. Ubuntu is a, it’s a south southern African humanistic philosophy of life. And I would say that first, let me back up to say that so much of our lives are circumscribed by a number of dialectics that we’re always trying to find the right balance between where we fall on the spectrum. Theologians are very used to this. We talk about it all the time. Where do you fall between faith and works? Where do you fall between free will and predestination, the transcendence, the otherness of God versus the imminence or the 

personal God? And you go too far to any of those extremes and there’s all sorts of problems with each of those. One of the biggest dialectics that we as a human race have had to deal with since the beginning of time is between individualism and collectivism. This idea of the worth of the individual.

(12:34):

That we are focused on ourselves, our tribe, our people in competition with everybody else trying to come out on top versus a collective or community focus where we understand that we are one, as the Bible talks 

about, we are all members of one body and we can’t live without each other. And the world is really quite divided here. The western world, which has dominated for the last many years has gone on a really hardtack towards individualism from the Roman Empire and Constantinian to the Enlightenment. And then on from there, our focus on I am therefore, or I think therefore I am. this idea that it is all about EZ fair competition, capitalism, it’s okay to compete and beat out others, but so much of the rest of the world 

is much more community oriented. You have in the East, you have Confucianism, you have Koreas idea of Jiang, you have our Pope talks about fertility tui, which is very similar to this South America La Familia.

(13:49):

But this idea that we are one body, and Ubuntu started off as a very humanist philosophy that a person can only be a person through other persons. And they talk about we wouldn’t speak, we wouldn’t know what to eat. There’s nothing about who we are as a human that isn’t completely dependent on each other. And so Archbishop Desmond Tutu took this very kind of secular humanistic philosophy and he turned it into a Christian theology by infusing it with this idea of Imago Day that God has created each of us with the image of God inside of us. So individuality is important and we are all important. One of the issues of the dialectic, if you go too far to the communal side, then you can wipe out whole races of people. If it’s for the common good, you can let someone die on the vine if it’s for the collective good. Whereas Archbishop Tutu’s understanding is no. Every human being has been created by God and is dearly loved by God as an individual. But we all, as Martin Luther King used to say, we will all either rise together or die as fools, that we are in an inextricably inseparable bundle of life. And that when one person is robbed 

of their humanity, when they’re ostracized, when they’re hurt, when they’re enslaved, when they’re oppressed, all of our humanities are diminished.

(15:23):

And wherever one person is freed or empowered or given life, we are all empowered. And that is the way that the world was meant to work. If you’re religious, if you’re one of these three Abrahamic religions, then Genesis is your starting point. And whether you take Genesis literally or just seriously still, the idea is that we are all blood brothers and sisters. We come from one place, we are related to each other. And even if you’re not religious, science is just more and more confirming the things that religious people 

were supposed to believe. All along that we are much more intricately tied to each other than we ever imagined. Stanford came out with a study back in 2011 that showed that 99.9% of our DNA is shared with every other human being in the world. And of that 0.1%, that one in a thousand parts, 96% of that is the difference between whether you’re a man or a woman. You’re tall, you’re short or blue-eyed. Only 4% of that 0.1%, four parts of 10,000 is what makes for cultural differences. Africans versus Chinese versus Aborigines versus Caucasians.

Katrina Carlson (16:46):

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 6 of 13

That’s amazing. That really is stunning. What a stunning fact.

Rev. David Carpenter (16:50):

I mean, it’s just so obvious that we are blood brothers and sisters that game seven degrees of Separation. Kevin Bacon, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon where you try to go back through the movies. Stanford in 2018 came out with a study that said that no human being alive on the planet at any given time needs to go back more than eight generations to find a direct DNA link, familial link with any other human being on the planet.

Katrina Carlson (17:20):

Wow, that’s really

Rev. David Carpenter (17:21):

So seven degrees

Katrina Carlson (17:23):

Close,

Rev. David Carpenter (17:23):

Kevin are eight degrees of all humanity, which is just, and so once again, what this is telling us is that we are one, we were meant to live together,

(17:35):

Be together, work for each other, hold each other up, serve each other. When Tutu was trying to describe Ubuntu, he said, it’s a very hard word to describe in the English language, but again, if you’re, you say, no, tu, it means that you have a lot of Ubuntu. And what that means is you’re incredibly generous and hospitable. You’re kind and caring and giving, but it’s not because you’re such a selfless person. It’s because you understand that we’re all directly linked together and that your good is my good. And so 

Ubuntu is the best form of self-interest.

Katrina Carlson (18:16):

I love that so much.

Rev. David Carpenter (18:18):

No

Katrina Carlson (18:18):

Kidding. I really, really, I

Rev. David Carpenter (18:19):

Want more Ubuntu.

Katrina Carlson (18:20):

Yeah, I want more. No, I think

Jefferson Denim (18:21):

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 7 of 13

That’s okay. So if we really lived this way, okay, let’s say we have the CIA and the balcony, but okay, if 

we really did live this way, what would that mean for our relationship with those of other faiths or people 

with no faith at all around a religious level? What does that mean?

Rev. David Carpenter (18:41):

Well, it means that particularly if you’re of the Abrahamic traditions, if you’re Muslim or Jewish or Christian, then your starting point is that we are all one. We are all the dearly beloved created children of the one creator God. Sometimes people will say, oh, they worship a different God. Well, we don’t have the luxury of saying that

Rev. David Carpenter (19:02):

You’re a polytheist, you could say that. But we all believe that there is only one God who created everything and everyone

Jefferson Denim (19:08):

For our audience polytheist for those who didn’t go to divinity school, what does that mean?

Rev. David Carpenter (19:12):

Poly, it means those who believe that there are many gods, many, many gods in the

Jefferson Denim (19:16):

Universe. I’m sorry to interrupt, keep going.

Rev. David Carpenter (19:17):

No, of course. But so if we do believe that there is just one God, then that one God created and adores all of us, and so suddenly, yeah, we can argue and debate about whether you all are worshiping God the way God wants to be worshiped or the way God should be understood. And we can talk about those things, but we don’t have the luxury of saying, oh, you have a different God than we do because it’s the same God. And we’re trying to figure out who that God is, how that God wants us to approach God, what God wants 

us to do in our life. And really the major religions have very little daylight in the kind of person they want us to be, the kinds of things they think God wants us to do. I mean, very similar. If you were to draw a picture of the ideal Christian or Jew or Muslim, it would look very, very similar, kind, patient, generous, compassionate, thoughtful, giving.

(20:11):

It would be very, very similar. So yes, there’s differences in how we understand that God and how we get to God, but Brian McLaren wrote a book and in it he said, Jesus and the Buddha and Moses and Muhammad walk into a bar and he said, that sounds like the beginning of a joke, but just imagine if the four of them actually went into a bar and got a few beers and stayed up until the wee hours of the morning talking about faith and life and who God is and what God wants from us. Does anybody doubt that they 

wouldn’t come out as the sun was rising up absolute best friends?

Katrina Carlson (20:49):

Absolutely.

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 8 of 13

Rev. David Carpenter (20:50):

That they would feel like they were with the other three people that they were closest to in this world not furthest away from, and I think that’s what God wants us, that people of other faith, they’re not our competition, they’re not our enemies. They are our beloved dialogue partners and we need to start understanding it that way.

Katrina Carlson (21:12):

Well, that is a dream. That would be a dream. I had love to see that happen and people to really understand what this BTU is Tu, that’s really amazing. So okay, I would imagine that that kind of thing also has ramifications on how we understand, let’s say the environment or God’s creation and our responsibility or stewardship of things like that. There’ve been all these extreme weather events happening recently and all around the world, and I think that people are really asking again about our responsibility to the environment, which is a whole other thing, and this is the place we live. Right? What do you think about that and the environment and the Bible and what you think?

Rev. David Carpenter (21:52):

Do you have six hours?

Katrina Carlson (21:53):

I know. I was going to

Rev. David Carpenter (21:54):

Say there’s so many things. I think about that first of all again, that if God really did create every person and everything and all of creation and loves it as God’s ultimate masterpiece, as God’s magnum opus, then there was a article that was written in 1967 by a man named Lynn White for Science magazine that made its rounds around all the academic circles and the universities, and in it, he blamed Christianity for the environmental crisis and actually has some really good points, particularly the Protestant Reformation and 

particularly the Calvinistic tradition. I’m a little embarrassed to say that as a Presbyterian, but it was many things happened during the Industrial Revolution where the church kind of got together with what was going on with business and tried to clear the way and provide theologies that made the industrial revolution possible. And one of the things they did is they started interpreting the book of Genesis in a very utilitarian manner throughout the scriptures from one end to the other, the Hebrew scriptures, the 

Christian scriptures, it’s very clear that we were created and intended to have a very caring, loving, personal, intimate relationship with the environment around us.

(23:16):

And yet what Lynn White said is that during the industrial revolution, we looked at Genesis and we interpreted things like take dominion over the environment, things like till the garden. And we used that to say that the environment was just there for our use, that we could take advantage of it, use it, exploit it if it was for our own good as human beings. And that is the opposite of what is meant. We just had Lee from Azua Pacific at our School of Christian Learning on Sunday, and she said that that word in Genesis two 15 till the garden is actually in Hebrew, serve the garden.

(24:00):

If we take that literally, if we take that seriously that we are here to serve the garden, serve the environment, serve the creation, it would change everything about the way that we take care of things. And John three 16, the most famous scripture in all of Christianity, American Christianity anyway, is what for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him, you see it in the end zones of every football game. You see it plastered everywhere. First of all, it’s almost as if 

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 9 of 13

when we hear that we’re not thinking. He’s saying, for God so loved the world, right? We’re thinking for God so loved what, us?

Rev. David Carpenter (24:41):

Human beings that God gave God’s only son. If you look at the actual Greek, what John chose when he was choosing that word for world is it’s for God so loved the Greek word cosmos, that he gave his only begotten son. You don’t have to be a Greek scholar to realize what that means, cosmos. That’s not humans,

(25:07):

That is not humans, that is all of creation. That is the entire universe. God gave his only begotten son that the whole cosmos should come back into relationship. That’s beautiful. If we are going to take seriously this idea that God created it all, that this is God’s beloved masterpiece, Psalm 1 48 talks about stars and moons, sing your praises to God, mountains and cows of the fields and streams and oceans and rivers. Sing your praises to God, birds of the air and the fish under the sea, the leviathans of the deep, the whales sing your praises to God. We start to understand that God created every bit of creation to be part of God’s celestial choir that would sing its praises back to God. So every time we clear cut a forest, every time we allow a species to go extinct in the rainforest or in the ocean, we are forever silencing something that was created by God to sing its praises back to God. And so I think we have to get back to an understanding if God made us a little lower than the angels, if God really did create us with the imago, the image of God,

Katrina Carlson (26:22):

Yeah, say what that is Imago de means

Rev. David Carpenter (26:24):

Image of God, image of God, and this understanding, this theological understanding that each one of us is created in God’s image, that we are special, we’re higher than the rest of creation. You’ve got to know that that was not meant so that we could have special exploitation of the creation or to take special advantage of the creation, but to be specially sent to care for and steward and watch over the creation.

Jefferson Denim (26:51):

I love that. That is way different than what I was taught when I was a young Christian. The dominion thing, you’re right. Let’s exploit the heck out of it, and if another species dies out, oh well, we were just meant to exploit it anyway, it’s hard to

Katrina Carlson (27:03):

Have. Yeah.

Jefferson Denim (27:04):

Alright. Given that I love this perspective and given the fact that 99.9% of our DNA is the same, we still have tribalism, we still have so many issues that for people, nefarious actors wanting to use for power, whatever, given all these things being true, what is your personal opinion about how do we move forward as people of faith or as people of human race? I mean, how do we move forward?

Rev. David Carpenter (27:32):

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 10 of 13

I think it starts with us understanding. I think one of the greatest consequences of our broken, fallen humanity is that we do not understand how interconnected and inseparable we are, and so we want to pretend that we are our own players, that we don’t stand on anyone’s shoulders. That story about the man who comes to the parade and the little boy’s on his dad’s shoulders and he’s like, oh, you look very tall today, and he said, oh, well, this isn’t all me. It’s really cute. If we can get back to an understanding that this is God’s creation, this is not ours, that we are inseparably tied together, that we are either going to rise together or die as fools, that we will get back to a place where we understand that we need to serve God’s creation. We need to serve each other, that we are each other’s keepers. The very next chapter after the story of the garden is Cain and Abel and Cain kills Abel, and then God comes to Cain and says, where’s your brother Abel? And what does he say? This question that’s rung down through the annals of history, am I my brother’s keeper?

(28:49):

And God doesn’t even give him an answer. He’s so bugged that he just says, what have you done? Because of course, yes, you are your brother’s keeper. You are meant to take care of one another. I put you there to serve one another, to be a family together, and so I think we need to deconstruct a lot of the ways we’ve understood this fierce capitalism and competition and tribalism and xenophobia, the sort of us first us in charge. We somehow have to weed that out. It is the very opposite of everything that Jesus came to proclaim and teach in his gospels.

Katrina Carlson (29:32):

Yes. Thank you. I’m so happy to hear that said out loud right here. So for those who might not be religious, but they’re looking for deeper meaning in their lives, I mean, you’ve touched on a lot of things, but what would you like to say to those people? Just because we have all kinds of listeners, and I mean you’re speaking, I feel too just about anyone, but anything else that you would like to touch on for that?

Rev. David Carpenter (29:58):

Yeah. When I was doing youth ministry, I used to tell the kids every year, if I could do anything in your time with us, I would love to somehow be able to surgically open your head and pour in a set of tools that you could use to question everything.

Katrina Carlson (30:15):

Wow.

Rev. David Carpenter (30:15):

Everything in your life, in our world question, our society question, your religion question, your parents question everything. Because I really honestly believe that if we were willing to ask the tough questions, if we are the real questions, the existential questions, who am I? Why am I here? What was I meant to do? How am I expected to interact

Rev. David Carpenter (30:40):

With others? How am I expected to understand God and my place in this world and my relationship with other people and with the environment, it would change everything. I believe that we keep ourselves so busy running ragged from sunrise to sunset because we’re scared to ask those big questions because we’re fearful there aren’t going to be any answers,

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 11 of 13

Katrina Carlson (31:01):

Or we’re not going to like the answer or

Rev. David Carpenter (31:02):

We’re not going to like the

Katrina Carlson (31:03):

Answers. The answer is sort of like a lot of effort, and it’s also a lot of giving, a lot of vulnerability and all of that, but it’s also just a lot of receiving as well. So that’s what it’s about, because if we were all doing that, we’d all be giving and receiving. I think that’s so true.

Jefferson Denim (31:17):

I love it too. To build on what you just said, I love it too because you own your own thoughts. You own your own faith this way. If you are not afraid to ask, well, first of all, otherwise your faith and your thoughts aren’t yours.

Speaker 4 (31:31):

They’ve

Jefferson Denim (31:31):

Been imported and you’re just mouthing the words. But if you a little

Katrina Carlson (31:35):

Robot going,

Jefferson Denim (31:36):

Right, but if you investigate it for yourself and then see evidence for yourself convincing yourself, then you own your own thoughts and you own your own faith, I think,

Jefferson Denim (31:46):

Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Rev. David Carpenter (31:48):

I mean, I really believe that if we could get people to slow down and ask themselves the most important, what do we say when people are super philosophical and asking these questions? Oh, they have way too much time on their hands,

Rev. David Carpenter (32:01):

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 12 of 13

But there is nothing more important than we could do in our short time on this earth than to ask those kinds of questions to try to find those answers. I don’t think you can ask those questions too long without starting to ask, okay, am I here for a reason? Was I created for a purpose, which will get you to start asking, do I believe that there’s a God? I mean, these are the questions that all of humanity has struggled with since the beginning of time.

Jefferson Denim (32:25):

Absolutely. Wow. What a beautiful perspective.

Katrina Carlson (32:27):

Thank you sharing that. Yeah, thank you for all this food, for thought and just wisdom.

Jefferson Denim (32:29):

Hey, if anyone is interested, I’m guessing someone will be. I am. If anyone is interested in what you’re up to at BPC, how would they find you? How would they keep up with what you’re doing

Rev. David Carpenter (32:41):

Or in hearing Jefferson play piano and sing beautifully? Yeah.

Katrina Carlson (32:45):

Yes. Well, the play

Rev. David Carpenter (32:46):

Piano part.

Katrina Carlson (32:47):

Yes, yes.

Rev. David Carpenter (32:47):

Maybe. Well, I’m just so grateful for you all. I can’t even tell you. But yeah, of course, call come by anytime, but we are always there worshiping at eight o’clock and 10 30 on Sunday mornings. We’d love to have you come by once again, wherever you are on your spiritual walk, wherever you aren’t on your spiritual walk. We would love to walk this journey with you.

Jefferson Denim (33:10):

Bring your R and your aren’t.

Katrina Carlson (33:12):

Yeah, you’re in Los Angeles here in Brentwood, in the community called Brentwood. Just, oh,

Rev. David Carpenter (33:17):

What’s the website? What’s the website? Www bpc usa.org.

Katrina Carlson (33:24):

This transcript was exported on Apr 01, 2025 – view latest version here.

CAH 49 Dave Carpenter v2 (Completed  03/30/25)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 13 of 13

Okay. That’s amazing. Well, we’re just so grateful that you’re here today with us. Thank you for imparting all of your wisdom and the studies that you’ve just studied, stoke extensively. So many things, and it’s just amazing because I’ve seen you preach over the years. But to hear you just answer these questions for us right here, it’s just a huge privilege and really, really inspiring. So hope our audience, and I know I trust they’re inspired as well. So Dave, Reverend Dave, pastor Dave, this most holy eminence. Dave, we 

thank you so much and for sharing your heart, and you are crazy amazing.

Jefferson Denim (34:02):

You’re crazy amazing. Thank you, my brother, and thank you, dear listeners for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with a friend, and remember to stay crazy amazing yourselves. So we’ll see you next time.

Katrina Carlson (34:14):

Stay crazy. Amazing. Thanks, Dave. Thank you. 

Music Outro: I want you to feel, I want you feel something crazy, 

crazy amazing. 

Speaker: If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, please make sure to write us at crazy Amazing humans@gmail.com.