David Felten
A native of Phoenix, David received a music education degree from Arizona State University before attending Boston University School of Theology where he earned his MDiv in Biblical Studies and History. Before completing Chaplaincy training at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center, David spent a year studying as a Rotary Graduate Scholar at Perth Theological Hall of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. There he received an Honours degree and a taste for Promite.
David has served as Pastor at Epworth United Methodist in West Phoenix, Via de Cristo in North Scottsdale, and The Fountains in Fountain Hills.
In an effort to offer educational materials that were not being produced by other publishers, David and fellow United Methodist pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, created the Living the Questions curriculum for Progressive Christians.
Although David is a full-time pastor, he’s never strayed far from his roots as a musician, playing in a wide variety of worship and concert settings and recording on a number of CDs.
In the wider community, David is one of the founding directors of Catalyst Arizona, formerly the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology, and is one of the founders of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, a group advocating for the full inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people both in the church and in the community. David is a ten-year veteran of the Dean’s Advisory Board of Boston University’s School of Theology and served on the board of the Phoenix Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
“Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching.”