the underview.

the underview. an exploration of the shaping of our place.

08/25/2026

episode link: https://www.theunderview.com/the-responses-with-monica-kumar-mike-rusch/

This episode turns the microphone around. Since the start of Season 3, listeners have been sending in what they're wrestling with, voice messages, letters, texts, and direct messages, some sharing things they may never have said out loud before. This episode belongs to those voices: a word of encouragement about a church that is flawed yet beautiful, a man who paid a price thirty years ago for standing where a current guest stands now, and a road-trip caller struck by Rev. Evan Garner's words that staying silent about division is a sin. Alongside them, letters trace a hundred years of Ozark faith in a few paragraphs, rural churches that were once the core of mutual aid and survival, and what happened when that care acquired conditions, and a listener discovers a door they never thought was open: "I never thought I could be welcome in a mosque."

The episode closes on the hardest question of the batch. A caller asks about the prophetic middle: what is it, where does Jesus stand in it, and what happens to integrity when the poles move, especially when they move at unequal pace? Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris of First United Methodist returns to answer him herself: the middle doesn't move, because it was never a point between positions — it's a commitment to hold the people, and prophecy relocates to wherever the dominant story isn't. Co-hosts close with a reflection on deep listening: the trust it takes to say a true thing out loud, and the posture it takes to hear it all the way to the end of the sentence.

08/18/2026

Fellowship Bentonville is new to a very old religious landscape. Most of the congregations in this season go back to the 1830s, to circuit riders and brush arbors and the first white settlement of this county.

Fellowship starts in 1983, in a living room in Bentonville, with seven couples who spent a year reading the book of Acts and asking whether a church could actually live that way, not just in a person's life, but in a whole region. They wanted their spiritual fingerprints everywhere and their name nowhere.

Forty-two years later, Fellowship gathers one of the largest congregations anywhere in Northwest Arkansas on a given weekend, and it is still preaching from the well where it first began.

Thankful to sit with Mark Schatzman and include his voice in this series.

Link: https://www.theunderview.com/the-bible-church-with-mark-schatzman-fellowship-bentonville/

07/22/2026

Thankful to share a table with Shahid Sheikh, President of the Bentonville Islamic Center and add his voice to this series of faith here in .

Shahid Sheikh shares the founding story of NWA's Muslim community, the five pillars of Islam, and what it means to build belonging in a place that didn't have a mosque twenty years ago.

We are thankful for the space to listen, ask questions, and hear the beauty of this community.

Link: https://www.theunderview.com/the-muslim-community-with-shahid-sheikh-bentonville-islamic-center/

07/14/2026

Thankful to share a table with Little Flock Primitive Baptist Church leaders Elder Tom Griffin and Deacon Paul Lindsey.

This is an Arkansas church, planted in 1843, that belongs to one of the oldest and (maybe) least-known traditions of American Protestantism.

Elder Tom Griffin and Deacon Paul Lindsey share their story and their church's story, a story of a church built to endure rather than grow.

07/07/2026

In this episode of the underview, Pastor Gary Wheat of The Assembly in Siloam Springs opens the door to a tradition born on Arkansas soil. The Assemblies of God was founded in Hot Springs in 1914, and the Assembly itself traces directly to the Pentecostal revival in Topeka, Kansas, making it one of the oldest continuously operating AG congregations in the state. Pastor Wheat arrived in 2001 to lead a church that couldn't make payroll and whose elder board had resigned. Over twenty-four years, he chose patience over vision-casting, loved a broken congregation back to health, and built a church whose identity rests on a single word: hope.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-assembly-of-god-church-with-gary-wheat/

This conversation explores what it means to lead one church in one place for a quarter century as the community around it changes. Pastor Wheat describes the tension between longtime Siloam Springs residents and newcomers, the realities of pastoring on the Oklahoma border near Cherokee Nation, and the shift from drawing people in to going out and serving, painting fences, cleaning up festivals, partnering with nonprofits. He shares the Monday morning coffee where pastors from different traditions meet as friends first and clergy second, his practice of referring people to other churches when they'd be a better fit, and the Pentecostal conviction that the Holy Spirit falls on everyone without checking credentials. It is a conversation about rootedness, generosity, and what it costs to stay.

06/30/2026

When the Walton Family Foundation released its Home Region Strategy 2030, we wanted to understand what the five-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar framework means for belonging in Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta.

In part one, Robert Burns, Director of the Foundation's Home Region Program, traces the strategy's four pillars: civic infrastructure, community building, entrepreneurship, and career-connected learning.

The conversation examines the relationship between the Foundation's philanthropic investment and the needs of their home state, Arkansas. We discuss community and belonging, how people find their way in, and who this region is ultimately being shaped for.

Thankful to sit with Robert to learn more.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-home-region-with-robert-burns-walton-family-foundation/

06/23/2026

Flagstone Church of Christ in Bentonville was planted sixteen years ago with about a hundred people from an established Church of Christ congregation in Rogers.

https://www.theunderview.com/the-flagstone-church-of-christ-with-marshall-brown/

What emerged was a congregation that lead pastor Marshall Brown describes as “probably the least Church of Christ church” in the area, a community that chose to lead with connection and welcome rather than the doctrinal boundary lines that have historically defined the tradition.

The Church of Christ tradition traces its roots to the Restoration Movement of the early 1800s, a radical effort to strip away denominational structures and return to the church described in the book of Acts. That founding impulse was resistance: no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible. But over two centuries, the tradition developed its own unwritten rules, about instruments in worship, about the roles of women, about who counts as truly baptized. In this conversation, Brown wrestles openly with which of those inherited boundaries serve the community and which keep people out.

He talks about preaching to a room that includes people from gated communities and people who slept on the floor of the Salvation Army the night before. He names the challenge of building empathy across economic and racial lines in one of the most affluent corners of Arkansas. And he raises a question the tradition may not be ready to answer: is Flagstone a departure from the Church of Christ, or a return to the thing it was always supposed to be?

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