1001 - Where to Begin ...
Friends: It all started with a phone call from a sports writing buddy back in 2006.
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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 91st
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.