the underview.

Mike Rusch

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

    قبل ٢٢ ساعة

    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

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

    ٣٠ يونيو

    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

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

    ٣٠ يونيو

    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

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

    ٢٣ يونيو

    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

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

    ١٦ يونيو

    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

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  6. the historic missionary baptist church with Pastor Jonathan F. Lowder, Sr. (ep 3, 12).

    ٩ يونيو

    the historic missionary baptist church with Pastor Jonathan F. Lowder, Sr. (ep 3, 12).

    From hush harbors to becoming a cathedral of resistance, The Historic St. James Missionary Baptist Church has been asking the same question since 1865: what do we owe the people who don't yet have a place here? Founded by Squire Jehagen, a man who had been held in bondage, in the same year the Civil War ended, St. James has outlasted arson, displacement, and every force that tried to silence it. It housed University of Arkansas students when the university wouldn't. It has fed this community through every generation since Reconstruction. And it is still showing up , organizing prayer vigils for immigrant neighbors swept up in ICE enforcement, running a food pantry that feeds nearly 2,600 people a month, and carrying a prophetic voice that has never been willing to separate Sunday morning from Monday's injustice. Pastor Jonathan Lowder Sr. came to Fayetteville from Georgia with twenty-five years of ministry behind him, shaped by a father who gave away everything he had, tested by grief, and called to a congregation he had never heard of. As an outsider reading this place from the inside, he brings a perspective that those of us who grew up here sometimes can't access. In this conversation, he reflects on what it means to inherit 160 years of resistance, why the question "do you care?" is the only question that matters, and what Northwest Arkansas has the opportunity, and the obligation, to become. Link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-historic-st-james-missionary-baptist-church-with-pastor-jonathan-f-lowder-sr 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

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  7. the permission with Darrel Harvey (ep 3, 11).

    ٢ يونيو

    the permission with Darrel Harvey (ep 3, 11).

    Darrel Harvey is the Chief Formation Officer at Workmatters.  Darrel spent more than forty years in ministry, raised in a small Holiness church an hour north of Detroit, ordained young, a planter of churches, a pastor of congregations. When his life changed. What he found on the other side wasn't certainty. It was permission. Permission to doubt, to ask, to loosen his grip and lean into the mystery of a faith he no longer needed to defend. In this conversation, recorded around a single table, he takes us back further than expected, before the New Testament, to a mixed multitude walking out of Egypt,  to argue that if we start the story in the wrong place, we end up drawing lines around who belongs and who doesn't. This is a conversation about wholeness and reckoning. Harvey names the hard things plainly: that doubt is not the absence of faith, certainty is; that an obsession with being right keeps us anxious, grasping, and forever sorting people into who's in and who's out; that it is difficult to follow Jesus in a superpower whose civic religion has its own sacred sites, its own hymns, its own devotion. Alongside co-hosts who push and wonder with him, he opens the door to a different posture, hospitality without an agenda, freedom extended to the neighbor, the image of God stamped on every person. The result is less a set of answers than an invitation: to let the frame crack, to admit it failed us, and to begin again. https://www.theunderview.com/the-permission-with-darrel-harvey 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

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  8. the united methodist church with Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris, part 2 (ep 3, 10).

    ٢٦ مايو

    the united methodist church with Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris, part 2 (ep 3, 10).

    ⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains the tragedy of gun violence and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. In part two of this conversation, Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris gets into what First United Methodist Church Bentonville is doing right now in the community. The church's Second Street Pantry served 47,000 people last year. Beer & Hymns raised a record $50,000 in a single night for the NWA Children's Shelter. The building is open seven days a week to nonprofits who can't afford space anywhere else. And the lead pastor lives in an RV — because she cannot afford to buy a home in the city she serves. Morris describes the congregation's participation in the ULI Faithful Foundations program and what it would mean to put workforce housing on church-owned land in downtown Bentonville. The conversation turns to Christian nationalism, which Morris calls antithetical to Christianity. She draws a distinction between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of the culture — and says if you read the Gospels and don't get offended, you didn't read the Gospels. She describes what she calls the prophetic middle: not wishy-washy, but incredibly principled. A place where conservative members and lesbian couples worship side by side. Where the pastor shows up at city council to say quit fighting about God in a civic meeting. And where wholeness means the reign of God — unity without uniformity, all of us together, and that is what God looks like. https://www.theunderview.com/the-first-united-methodist-church-with-rev-dr-michelle-morris-part-1 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

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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.

المعلومات

  • صناع العمل
    Mike Rusch
  • سنوات النشاط
    ٢٠٢٤ - ٢٠٢٦
  • الحلقات
    ١٠٨
  • التقييم
    فاضح
  • حقوق النشر
    © 2026 the underview.
  • موقع البرنامج على الويب
    the underview.

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