Fellowship Bible Church 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.

Mark Schatzman grew up Roman Catholic in a military family that moved eleven times in fourteen years, walked away from church at thirteen, and came to faith at eighteen at the University of New Mexico. He arrived in Northwest Arkansas in 2005, almost exactly halfway through Fellowship's history, and was mentored by Robert Cupp, the founding pastor from the living room days. In this conversation he describes a church he insists is an organism rather than an organization, one whose program is its people, a woman with no personal stake in disability who started what became a decades-long ministry, a small group that filled half a garage with canned goods and became Samaritan Community Center, where Schatzman now serves on the Board of Directors. He names politics as the new American religion and explains why he decides what he won't say before he decides what he will, why he draws a hard line between culture wars and cultural apologetics, and what it has cost him. 

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

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Anglicanism has little history in the Arkansas Ozarks. This is Baptist and Methodist country, shaped by circuit riders and farmer-preachers, later by the Southern Baptist Convention, and later still by the nondenominational churches that arrived as the corporations grew. The prayer book never made it up here. So a congregation that says the same creed every Sunday, kneels to confess, and comes forward every week to receive communion is a genuinely new thing in this place, except that nothing about it is new. The creed is older than the country. The prayer book is older than the state. Christ the King Anglican Church has spent four years in a rented fellowship hall off the interstate, and is now buying a building of its own. The only new thing is the address.

The Rev. Ashley Mathews grew up Southern Baptist in a small Arkansas town, in a church where the school principal directed the choir. A turn toward faith at nineteen, at a Baptist Collegiate Ministry table in Mountain Home, set a direction she never left. She studied philosophy, then theology at a Presbyterian seminary in Atlanta, where she saw women teach the Bible for the first time. She found Anglicanism almost by accident, walking into a church in Little Rock precisely because she expected not to feel anything there, and was ordained a priest in the city that formed her. In 2022 she came home. In this conversation she describes the via media as a tradition built out of cooperation rather than victory, why she refuses to hear liturgy as a correction of the traditions people came from, and what it means to pastor a predominantly white, middle-class congregation in the most demographically layered city in Arkansas. She names her fear plainly: that a region growing this fast will come to believe its own affluence can save it, and stop extending one another the benefit of the doubt. And she offers wholeness as shalom, one integrated life, because Jesus didn't have a spiritual life and then the rest of his life. He just had a life.

episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-anglican-church-with-rev-ashley-mathews-christ-the-king

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
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Host: @mikerusch

First Christian Church has stood in Bentonville since 1867, thirteen people in a house, two years after the Civil War, eighty years before Sam Walton opened a store on the downtown square. Today it sits about a mile from the global campus of one of the largest companies on earth, and that nearness is the reason for this conversation. The Reverend Dr. Don Morrow has been senior minister here since 1997, and his doctorate is in a subject Northwest Arkansas almost never preaches: economics and the Bible. What does scripture actually say about money, work, and enough in a place whose entire story is an economic one?

This is a conversation about the Disciples of Christ tradition and its open table, where all are welcome and all means all. It is also a conversation about the economics of Jesus manna that could not be hoarded, a prayer for daily bread, a year of Jubilee where debt is wiped clean. Along the way it turns toward the harder questions: the difference between charity and justice, the workers a region calls essential and pays the least, and whether a system doing exactly what it was designed to do can still leave people behind. It is honest, and at moments uncomfortable, and it lands on a table where the radical claim is not that we are undeserving but that we are.

Episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-disciples-of-christ-church-with-rev-dr-don-morrow-first-christian-church-waterway

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

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Host: @mikerusch

In part two, Shahid Sheikh refuses the label of victim and names the resilience of a faith that has survived 1,400 years in every political climate. The conversation turns to what Islam actually teaches about economics, power, and human dignity, and how much of it overlaps with values Christianity already holds. 

Sheikh challenges listeners to ask who profits from the fear of Islam: the industries built on debt, addiction, exploitation, and war that Islam explicitly forbids. He tells the story of structuring an interest-free deal with a Baptist car wash owner who paused and said, "That's in my Bible too." 

He describes visiting an elderly Christian couple he loves, strong in faith, struggling with rising costs, and gently asking why they're focused on headlines about Iran when their own economic security is being eroded by the systems they defend. Sheikh names Miss Jean, a retired Christian teacher from his childhood in Dalton, Georgia, who baked cookies and taught his siblings English when his father was working two jobs, a woman he prays for to this day. 

He introduces the concept of ummah, the global Muslim community that crosses every boundary, and the M4C food pantry that serves anyone in Bentonville without questions, theology, or gatekeepers. Asked about his fears, Sheikh worries that Northwest Arkansas will profit from diversity without investing in it. Asked about wholeness, he answers with the opening words of every chapter of the Quran: compassion and mercy. "Any society without compassion and mercy, I don't want to be a part of."

episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-muslim-community-with-shahid-sheikh-bentonville-islamic-center-part2

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

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Host: @mikerusch

In part one of this two-part conversation, Shahid Sheikh, president of the Bentonville Islamic Center, traces the journey of Northwest Arkansas's Muslim community from a handful of families gathering in garages, parking lots, and rented hotel halls to a thriving community of over twelve hundred people to build a permanent masjid and community center in Benton County. Co-hosted by Monica Kumar, the conversation opens with Sheikh's personal story, immigrating from Pakistan as a child, growing up in the Bible Belt of Dalton, Georgia, navigating the smell of curry on the school bus and the sting of childhood difference, and eventually choosing Islam as his own faith after a year and a half of studying Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. Sheikh walks listeners through the foundations of Islam: the Shahada, the meaning of "Muslim" as one who submits to the will of God, and the five pillars that structure a life oriented toward God without exception or time off.

The conversation moves into the founding story of the Bentonville Islamic Center, how families pooled their own money, purchased and renovated an old house, and built a place to belong without borrowing from a bank. Sheikh describes the extraordinary diversity within the community, families from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and beyond, and extends an open invitation to any listener who wants to visit the mosque, observe, ask questions, or simply sit and share chai. Monica Kumar draws on her own immigrant experience from Uganda and India to surface shared patterns of sacrifice, displacement, and the fierce determination to give back more than you've received. The episode builds to Sheikh's defining statement on belonging: "Belonging is not only something that you find, it's something you build. And I've chosen, along with the 1,200-plus Muslims in Northwest Arkansas, we've chosen to belong here."

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

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Host: @mikerusch

Drive the back roads between Rogers and Pea Ridge and you'll pass a small white church that gave its town a name. Little Flock Primitive Baptist Church was constituted in 1843, planted out of the older Shiloh congregation whose building is now a museum in downtown Springdale. It belongs to one of the oldest and least understood strands of American Protestantismm a people who broke from the wider Baptist world in the 1830s by refusing the machinery of organized religion: the mission boards, the seminaries, the Sunday schools, the paid clergy. They kept the name "Primitive" not because it meant backward, but because it meant original, a return to the apostolic pattern. Family worship, congregational singing with no band and no production, and a conviction that salvation is God's finished work, not a transaction to be earned.

In this conversation, Elder Tom Griffin and Deacon Paul Lindsey open the church's original minute books and tell its story: a sanctuary Union troops turned into a hospital during the Battle of Pea Ridge, a town that later incorporated to keep a landfill out, hand-hewn oak beams older than the building they hold up. But the history is only the frame. What these two are really describing is a way of belonging that runs against the grain of a region that measures nearly everything by growth, a church that has never once asked how to get bigger, only how to stay faithful, and that believes it blossoms under burden rather than under plenty. The episode closes with a recording of the congregation's singing, shared as a gift. What can a people who choose to endure teach a place that has staked everything on expansion?

Link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-primitive-baptist-church-with-tom-griffin-and-paul-lindsey-little-flock-arkansas/

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

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Host: @mikerusch

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.

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.

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

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Host: @mikerusch

After the strategy conversation, co-host Monica Kumar led a different kind of exchange. Robert Burns, Director of the Walton Family Foundation's Home Region Program, shares the arc of his own faith journey: a rural North Carolina upbringing rooted in church every Sunday, a season when faith communities weren't open to who he was, and the community of faith he and his partner Cris have found here in Northwest Arkansas.

The conversation moves through loneliness and the gift of invitation, exclusion and the courage to show up anyway, hope after a Category 4 hurricane, and what it means to flourish. A deeply human episode that returns us to the heart of season three: the faith of Northwest Arkansas, and what it does with belonging.

Part one covers the WFF Home Region Strategy 2030. Listen there first.

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
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Host: @mikerusch

When the Walton Family Foundation released its Home Region Strategy 2030 in May 2026, the underview paused its season to ask what it means. Robert Burns, director of the Foundation's Home Region Program, sits down with Mike Rusch and Monica Kumar to walk through the five-year framework guiding hundreds of millions in philanthropic investment across Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta.

The conversation covers the strategy's four pillars:  civic infrastructure, community building, entrepreneurship, and career-connected learning, as well as the Foundation's relationship to the NWA Council's Vision 2045, the question of housing affordability, and who this region is ultimately being shaped for.

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
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Host: @mikerusch

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. Its lead minister, Marshall Brown, grew up in Fort Smith, attended Harding University, and spent over a decade in youth ministry before taking a leap into something he hadn't planned, building a new church from the ground up. What emerged was a congregation that 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?

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

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe
Host: @mikerusch