By Steve Brawner, © 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Dylan and Lauran McMahan of Hot Springs weren’t looking for an alternative to the typical American culture in which they were living. But they found it. And when they saw it, as McMahan said, they couldn’t “unsee it.” 

That’s when they moved the family to Homestead Heritage, a Christian community near Waco, Texas, that emphasizes faith, personal relationships, and a simple, agrarian lifestyle.

At Homestead Heritage, members believe their church should be a body of people connected to every facet of life – not merely a place where a person attends services on Sunday morning. While Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, members at Homestead are making what they call their own “exodus” away from modern America’s secular, fragmented culture, where rugged individualism and competition have left people isolated and lonely. 

“I mean, even the word ‘church’ means ‘called out ones,’” McMahan said. “So we’re called out of one community and culture into another community and culture, and that should be the community of Christ.”

Homestead Heritage community members seek what McMahan called “a sense of wholeness” and “real life.” They use the internet but don’t watch TV. Everybody has a garden, and there’s a shared farm tilled with horse-drawn plows. A craft village gives outsiders a chance to purchase the community’s wares and get a taste of Homestead Heritage’s alternative but not completely foreign way of life. Fifteen thousand people visited its recent Thanksgiving weekend fair. 

Gardening brings a person back to life’s natural rhythms, McMahan said, noting that a number of Jesus’ parables related to agriculture.

“It teaches you there’s times and seasons, and that you can’t just do anything whenever you want,” he said. “You’ve got to hit those windows. And then it teaches you hard work. But also, it also teaches you delayed gratification, that if you wait, there’s going to be a reward if you keep sowing the right seeds.”

McMahan grew up in Hot Springs, married Lauran when they were both 19, and became a youth minister. One year, he took his youth group to a church camp at Lonsdale, where he met a man who told him about Homestead Heritage. 

The McMahans visited the community in 2017. They loved their life in Arkansas and didn’t intend to move. But they were “blown away” by the relationships, the cooperation, the family dynamics and the other aspects of the community’s lifestyle.

“We came back to Arkansas from that visit, and we couldn’t unsee what we saw,” he said. “We couldn’t unfeel what we had felt, the level of love and unity.”

As they continued their youth ministry, they noticed how the wider American culture was affecting young people with incessant social media, peer pressure, broken homes and loneliness. They noted how their own children were being influenced.

The McMahans made the move in 2018 and are raising their now six children there. He began working for a timber frame company doing barn restoration and building construction. Eventually he started working with leather. Now he owns several businesses including Heritage Leather, which has a retail store and sells to locations across the United States. 

He and Lauran lead one of the community’s worship groups that meets weekly. Roughly 50 of its 200 members are from Arkansas. 

Homestead Heritage has planted communities in other states and countries. I asked if there might be one in Arkansas’ future. 

“We’re not trying to force anything or make anything happen,” he said. “Like I said, we’ve had 50 or 60 people from Arkansas move here even in the last five or six years, but all of those people still feel drawn to Arkansas, and they know that God wants to do something there. We just want it to be His timing and His way.”

Homestead Heritage will not be for everyone. Its theological stances are pretty conservative. The way of life will be a bridge too far for many people. Many may not be able to pack up and move to Texas or to its other locations. 

We all, however, can learn from the members’ efforts to seek and find God, to be intentional about relationships, to value connection and collaboration over individualism and competition, and to work with our hands to create, plant, sow and grow. 

As McMahan put it, “I would say, start where you’re at. … Finding sustainable connections and relationships that can challenge you, encourage you, see things from a different perspective, that will speak the truth to you, not just tell you everything you want to hear, and to begin to find your place in a larger design.”

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 20 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.