If there's such a thing as sweeps week in heaven, it might be hard to beat today's blockbuster at an East Anchorage church.
John Carpenter, a sportscaster at Channel 2 for the last 28 years and one of the city's most recognizable personalities, makes his official debut as associate pastor at Baxter Road Bible Church with a sermon today -- the first in a three-part series -- that's been promoted the way a network might hype a sweeps-week special.
"Why?" asks the print ad, which includes a big head shot of Carpenter. "Why would a person quit a job they love, take big cut in pay, to go into ministry?"
To which Carp responds: "How big a cut are we talking about?"
Not that it really matters. The man whose nightly sportscasts were often as much comedy show as they were scores and highlights is eager to take his act to a more solemn stage, eager to answer a higher calling.
No doubt he'll have congregants rolling in the aisles in no time.
"That's part of who I am, and Channel 2 let me do that," Carpenter, 51, said last week as he prepared for his premiere. "I clearly like to make people laugh. It's a way to get people to tune in, to keep them interested. It just comes naturally to me. My eighth-grade social studies teacher once stopped a class to say, 'Mister Carpenter, you will never make a living being a smart aleck,' and I spent 28 years proving him wrong."
Humor will have a place in his sermons, but Carpenter -- known by many as just Carp -- couldn't be more serious about his new career.
"I've been a Christian for a long time, or at least I thought I was, and then in about 1998 I had an experience that led me to believe to think, 'I say I am but I'm not.' I made the decision to walk the walk," he said.
His wife, Kelley, a schoolteacher, set things in motion when she attended a women's ministry convention in Portland and returned home with a renewed commitment to her faith. Carp calls it her epiphany. She became more active in church, more devout, but Carp hung back.
Then, when the convention came to Anchorage and Carp got roped into running a camera to tape a guest speaker's comments, the speaker spotted Carp in the room full of woman and addressed him personally.
"God says you're at a crossroads and he wants to know what you're going to do," Carp remembers her saying.
"I don't remember what happened next because I was terrified," he said. "That night I'm laying in bed, thinking 'he wants to know what I'm going to do,' and finally I just asked. It's 2 in the morning and I'm sweating and I say, 'God, what do you want me to do?' And the answer was 'Just do something.'
"It came to me that here I was, not doing anything. ... I had been sitting in the same spot. I hadn't moved."
The next year, 1999, Carp started taking college-level Bible classes. That's when he heard his first call from God -- the one that told him to become a teacher. So he continued to study while also teaching Sunday school and speaking at Wednesday night services at Abbott Loop Community Church.
Carp and Kelley had a son, Sam, in 2004, and a few years later Carp heard another calling -- one telling him to become a pastor. Though he didn't mention it to anyone for awhile, something Kelley said helped him heed it.
"You aren't supposed to work at Channel 2 forever," she told him.
Although he probably could have if he wanted to. He had natural talent and an almost universal likability.
A 1977 Chugiak High graduate, Carp bypassed college in favor of a variety of jobs until he was hired to work the overnight shift at KENI radio, a rock station at the time. Soon he became a disc jockey. In 1983, Channel 11 offered him $50 to do sports on its new weekend broadcast.
"I'd do it for free, but I didn't want to tell them," said Carp, who became a sports fans in the fifth grade when he ordered two football books for 50 cents apiece. He still has the books, which triggered a life-long love of sports.
In April 1984, Channel 2 came calling. For the next 28 years, Carp delivered sports news and belly laughs five nights a week.
He was never better than when he made a mistake. Using broad and often self-deprecating humor, he'd call attention to his gaffes and turn them into solid gold. His comedic touch led to a feature called "The World According to Carp," and his weekly summertime fishing reports became a reliable source of entertainment where part of the joke was Carp getting skunked.
"I'm gonna miss it," Carpenter said. "That was good times. I'll miss all that stuff, but other good stuff is coming. I haven't traded down. I traded up."
After Carpenter decided to leave Channel 2 for the non-denominational Baxter Road Bible Church, someone asked him if he was worried about leaving such a secure job and successful career for something he's never done before.
"They said it was like working without a net," Carpenter said, "but this is probably the best net I've ever had. If you don't believe in God it would be working without a net, but he's got me covered."
Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4335.
By BETH BRAGG
bbragg@adn.com