Friends: It all started with a phone call from a sports writing buddy back in 2006. 

--- --- ---

Labels: column history, Current in Carmel, George Bebawi, My Walk, Psalms 107:2, Russ Blowers, wife Pam

Spirituality Column #1001

January 20, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Where to Begin …   

By Bob Walters

“Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story …” – Psalms 107:2

Steve Greenberg called me in the summer of 2006, inquiring whether I’d be interested in being the managing editor of a new weekly newspaper he and a friend were starting. The paper was – and with proliferation still is – Current in Carmel.

Steve was a longtime journalism friend and colleague; he was the sports editor at the Indianapolis Star in the 1990s while I was the public relations director at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In the 1980s I had been a sportswriter at the Star, knew Steve from being elsewhere in the Indiana sports media and, when we were independents in the late 1990s and early 2000s, worked on various publishing and PR projects together.

Though grateful, I turned down Steve’s Current editorial offer since at the time I had a good job in corporate communications and joked with him that I didn’t want to be unemployed in a year when the Current newspaper failed because newspapers were dying off, not starting up.

But I did offer to provide – free of charge – content for Current in Carmel, a weekly religion column which initially was called “In Spirit.” Steve hadn’t thought of a Christian-focused weekly feature, but I pitched the notion that Carmel is exactly the kind of community that goes to church: affluent, educated, and family oriented.  Six of the largest protestant churches in Indiana were located either in or adjacent to Carmel, along with being central to three huge Catholic parishes.

Steve, though not religious himself, said okay. Current was an otherwise completely secular publication, so my musings about Christianity, culture, and my own still-new Christian walk amounted to a jarring, contextual non-sequitur. Steve found my content “edgy” – a compliment; I wrote like a sportswriter, not a pastor, and the editors never touched it; the column ran as written. I also wrote with the gee-whiz wonder of nascent, intense faith, constant encouragement from pastor Russ Blowers, and fresh perspectives from Bible scholar and teacher George Bebawi.

I was baptized in November 2001 and had struck up a friendship with Russ that over time included many emails back and forth. Then – a God thing – I met George at a picnic gathering of old high school friends in May of 2002. With Russ’s cheerleading, I submitted a one-year-after-9/11 column titled “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” to the Star, which it printed on its editorial page September 11, 2002. After that Russ constantly urged me to establish a writing ministry.

George, about whom I have written dozens if not hundreds of times in the weekly column, also became an email pal while he was still on the divinity faculty at Cambridge University, England. He retired in spring 2004 and moved to Carmel where he married wife May, whom I had met through those same high-school friends some 20 years earlier.  Russ and I convinced George to teach a weekly Bible and doctrine class at our East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. From its beginning in September 2004 until 2018 I coordinated the class, formatting George’s teaching materials and taking copious notes of my own. I have them all and will never run out of material.

When Current in Carmel went live with the column November 7, 2006 – only its third edition – In Spirit elicited an avalanche of “you can’t run that religious stuff in a public newspaper” reaction, which created buzz that Steve and his publishing partner loved. They would forward complaint emails to me, to which I would respond with kind conviction, never bitterness or condescension. 

Voila! I had my writing ministry.

Russ was my editor that first year, always tickled at my boldness and forthright Christian / Bible witness, cheering me on and rarely citing corrections.  Russ died in November 2007, and I met my wife Pam at his funeral.  She has been my encouraging and gentle editor ever since.

We published my first 260 columns (five years) in late 2011 as a book, Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary, followed by Volume II in mid-2017. Those were fun, bucket list check-offs (“publish a book”), but have no plans for more.  Current succeeded wildly and quickly expanded to editions for Noblesville, Westfield, Fishers, Zionsville, and Geist, and ran the column through 2015.

When Current canceled In Spirit, Pam and I figured, “Why stop?” We have a blog, around six hundred on our free, weekly email list (happy to add more, just ask), and post on social media.

So now nearly 20 years on we are 1,000 columns in – make that 1,001; 1,001 weeks in a row without a miss. You never know what the Holy Spirit is going to come up with, but I plan to keep paying close attention.

Walters’ (rlwcom@aol.com) books are available Here, the blog is Here, and the story about meeting Pam is in columns 763, 764, and 765 in the blog. Greenberg is a good guy but not religious. Walters always included his own email address in the column for comment, and incidentally, was laid off from that corporate communications job a year after telling Steve the newspaper wouldn’t work.  One thousand columns are a lot but Walters isn’t getting cocky; minister Dave Faust who baptized Walters at E91 in 2001 has been writing weekly pastoral and Bible columns for various magazines for more than 30 years. He’s somewhere around 1,600. BTW, while trying to come up with a title for the first book, good friend Stan Naraine dubbed the weekly efforts “common Christianity” and added something about uncommon commentary, or maybe Walters did.  Anyway, it stuck.