Returning a Gift, Part 1

Spirituality Column #55
November 27, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Returning a Gift, Part 1
By Bob Walters

This Christmas season I’m going to talk about the best gift I ever got, and about how desperately I want to return it.

My dear friend Russ Blowers died a couple weeks ago. He was a prominent Christian preacher in Indianapolis known throughout the nation and, because of his influence on countless global missionaries, throughout the world.

Over the years Russ
- built a local congregation of 4,000 or so at East 91st Street Christian Church,
- was a good friend of Billy Graham’s,
- chaired or otherwise facilitated the Graham Crusades here in Indy,
- had a vision for both global missions and North American church planting,
- raised two exceptional sons Phil and Paul,
- cared for and stood by his wife Marian (they were married in 1946) through a decade of Alzheimer’s until her death in 2004,
- was a World War II Army Air Corps veteran,
- and, among a zillion other things, was that preacher on Indianapolis Channel 8’s daily “Chapel Door” featurette (oh, yeah … ) from 1954 through 1968.

I had never heard of Russ Blowers (rhymes with “flowers”) until I wandered into “E 91” Labor Day weekend of 2001. Russ had been senior pastor at East 49th Street Christian Church beginning Sunday, Sept. 2, 1951, moved the congregation up to Castleton and East 91st St. in 1977, and retired in 1996.

That Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001, happened to be the exact 50-year anniversary of his ministry with that Congregation.

I was sitting in the back row.

Understand I hadn’t been to church on any Sunday, including Easter, more than a half dozen times since I was a teenager in the early 1970s. I’d go to funerals and weddings, but the God thing wasn’t for me. Christ seemed like a good idea but made no sense. The Holy Spirit was just another ghost floating in the ether, and the Bible was just another old book of decent advice that was hard to read.

It was sitting in the back row that Sunday as Russ, retired but invited back to the pulpit, spoke of Faith, Hope and Love – “The Abiding Values of East 91st” was his sermon title – when “something like scales fell from my eyes” (see Acts 9:18 … maybe read the whole chapter?), and a very surprising tear trickled down my face.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will unwind this story over the coming weeks. He was in church that day because his 13-year-old son Eric suggested it.