the underview.

Mike Rusch
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

  1. 2d ago

    the muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 2 (ep. 3, 20).

    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. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 2 (ep. 3, 20).

  2. Jul 21

    the muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 1 (ep. 3, 19)

    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. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the muslim community with Shahid Sheikh, part 1 (ep. 3, 19)

  3. Jul 14

    the primitive baptist church with Tom Griffin and Paul Lindsey (ep 3, 18).

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

    the primitive baptist church with Tom Griffin and Paul Lindsey (ep 3, 18).

  4. Jul 7

    the assembly of god church with Gary Wheat (ep 3, 17).

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

    the assembly of god church with Gary Wheat (ep 3, 17).

  5. Jun 30

    the home region with Robert Burns, part 2 (ep 3, 16).

    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 Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the home region with Robert Burns, part 2 (ep 3, 16).

  6. Jun 30

    the home region with Robert Burns, part 1 (ep 3, 15).

    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 Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the home region with Robert Burns, part 1 (ep 3, 15).

  7. Jun 23

    the church of christ church with Minister Marshall Brown (ep 3, 14).

    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

    the church of christ church with Minister Marshall Brown (ep 3, 14).

  8. Jun 16

    the southern baptist church with Pastor Dustin Barton (ep 3, 13).

    ⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of historical violence and harm, and references to sexual and physical abuse within faith communities. Listener discretion is advised. Greenland, Arkansas is a town of about fourteen hundred people, just south of Fayetteville. Highway 71 used to run through it. Then the interstate came, and the town quieted. First Baptist Greenland was planted there in the 1960s. Pastor Dustin Barton grew up at this church. He came to faith here. He served on staff here. He left when a previous pastor weaponized the pulpit during a local political fight that divided the congregation and harmed the community. Years later, he came back as lead pastor to do the patient work of repair. This is one Southern Baptist voice from inside the tradition, not from a megachurch, not from a regional platform, but from a small-town pastor who has lived the consequences of a church getting too close to the fire of political power. Pastor Dustin speaks to the SBC's complicated founding, his Romans 13 read that puts kingdom citizenship before national citizenship, the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation when a community has been hurt, and what it takes to rebuild a congregation and a town after a pulpit has caused harm.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-southern-baptist-church-with-pastor-dustin-barton/ 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

    the southern baptist church with Pastor Dustin Barton (ep 3, 13).
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About

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Rusch
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    111
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 the underview.
  • Show Website
    the underview.