the underview.

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 lea...

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...

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-Mississ...

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 em...

⚠️ 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 t...

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...

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 m...

⚠️ 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 fo...

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains the tragedy of gun violence and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. First United Methodist Church Bentonville has stood on the same corner since 1832 before Arkansas was a state, before the Civil War, and through nearly two centuries of transformation. In part one of this two-part conversation, lead pastor Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris shares her personal...

Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville was organized on May 23, 1848, making it one of the oldest surviving church in the city. In this episode, Reverend Evan D. Garner , the church's rector, traces a tradition rooted in the Church of England's belief that a parish exists to serve everyone within its boundaries, not just its members. From the founding documents that carry the...

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to the enslavement of Black communities and the impact of immigration enforcement on immigrant families. Listener discretion is advised. St. Joseph Catholic Church in Fayetteville has been part of Northwest Arkansas since 1844 — eight years after Arkansas statehood, before the Civil War, before the university. The earliest recorded baptisms in F...

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to Indigenous removal, the history of enslavement, and the dehumanization of Black communities in the Arkansas Ozarks. Listener discretion is advised. In the conclusion of a two-part conversation, historian Rachel Whitaker of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History moves from the Civil War era into the twentieth century and the present day. Whitaker...

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains references to Indigenous removal, the history of enslavement, and the dehumanization of Black communities in the Arkansas Ozarks. Listener discretion is advised. In the first part of a two-part conversation, historian Rachel Whitaker of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History traces the arrival of faith in Northwest Arkansas from the 1820s through the Civil War...

In Season 3 of the underview, we begin where every honest conversation about faith has to begin with a starting point. Monica Kumar joins as co-host for "the faith of Northwest Arkansas," and this episode is the Monica's story, the work of naming who we are, what we carry, and what we are afraid of as we step into a season-long exploration of how faith shapes place and belonging acr...

Before Season 3 moves further into the faith of Northwest Arkansas, this interstitial pause defines the five words the season is built on faith, religion, theology, church, and ideology and asks what happens when their differences are not fully understood. Faith is interior, personal, not available for public examination. Religion is what a tradition carries across generations. Theology is the pub...

In the opening episode of Season 3, the underview begins its most ambitious exploration yet: the faith of Northwest Arkansas. From the seat of a gravel bike on a quiet Sunday morning in Benton County, the episode traces the religious history of the Ozarks from the earliest circuit riders and Cumberland Presbyterians at Cane Hill to the founding of Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and Episcopal congre...

Season 3 of the underview traces the faith that built Northwest Arkansas, from frontier revivals to megachurches, from the invisible church of enslaved people to the Spanish-language masses reshaping our region today. This season asks hard questions about religion as both meaning and power. Circuit riders crossed 600 miles to preach personal transformation. Cumberland Presbyterians established Cai...

This bridge episode sits in the tension of the current moment. Across two seasons, the underview has traced power in Northwest Arkansas from indigenous removal through racial terror to the displacement happening right now, asking what our institutions resisted and what they accommodated. The answer, consistently, has been accommodation: going along, choosing comfort over confrontation, narrowing t...

What happens to a community when no one is paying attention? Since 2005, America has lost more than 3,200 newspapers and the number of journalists per capita has dropped from 40 to just 8 per 100,000 people. The consequences are measurable: voter turnout drops, fewer people run for office, and communities lose the capacity to know what's happening to themselves. Bentonville had local journali...

In Northwest Arkansas, where housing affordability was once the region's greatest draw, working families are increasingly being pushed to the edges. Women with children in their cars are showing up at church doorsteps asking a question congregations struggle to answer: "What do I do? Where do I go?" When Christ and Neighbor Church in Rogers was approached about the Urban Land Instit...

In a region where home prices have jumped 70.9% in five years and median rent has increased by double digits across every major city, affordable housing solutions can feel elusive. But the Faithful Foundations program, created by the Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas , offers a different approach: what if churches could use land they already own to help address the crisis? Candi Adams, Di...

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Perla Guerrero , Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and author of Nuevo South , to explore one of the most significant transformations in Northwest Arkansas history: what happens when a place that was overwhelmingly white through most of the 20th century experiences rapid demographic diversification. Dr. Guerrero shares her o...

Solomon Burchfield , Executive Director of New Beginnings NWA , brings both lived experience and professional expertise to one of Northwest Arkansas's most urgent challenges. Growing up in a family that faced the real possibility of homelessness. That formative memory, combined with years working directly with chronically homeless neighbors, has shaped his vision for what he calls "unive...

In this episode of the underview , we sit down with Victor Gurel , CEO of Trailblazers , the organization shaping how Northwest Arkansas moves, connects, and imagines its future. From singletrack to city streets, Trailblazers leads the region’s effort to design trails, tunnels, and active transportation systems that connect communities through shared infrastructure. Their work reminds us that move...

In this episode of the underview , host Mike Rusch sits down with Michael Spivey (President & CEO), Brannon Pack (Senior Director of Operations), and Bobby Finster (Project Lead) from the Ozark Foundation to explore the future of the Arkansas Rural Recreational Roads Initiative (R3) . As the cycling community in Northwest Arkansas continues to grow, it also finds itself navigating complex divi...