A United Methodist Church without a building — yet
Understory gathers Sunday mornings at the Camp Bowie Cinema in Ridglea — folding chairs, real coffee, and no building fund passing the plate.
6503 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, TX 76116 — enter through the main lobby doors
We rent this room. On purpose. Doors open at 9:30 for coffee in the lobby. Our crew moves in at 8 and moves out by noon, and the popcorn smell never quite leaves. If you’re looking for a building, this isn’t one — it’s a room we borrow so more of what we have can go toward people instead of a mortgage.
Why a movie theater
Understory started in a living room in Ridglea in the fall of 2022, when a couple dozen families whose home congregation had closed after seventy years decided they weren’t ready to stop meeting.
Six months later, on Easter morning 2023, forty of us set up folding chairs in the Camp Bowie Cinema before the matinee schedule started — and we’ve been doing it every week since. We’re a congregation of the United Methodist Church, three years old this Easter, still meeting in a room somebody else owns.
We don’t have a building fund, and we’re not raising one right now. We have a rented screen, a stack of chairs, and each other. Most weeks, that’s turned out to be plenty.
The manifest
Nothing here is permanent, so everything here is intentional. This is what our set-up crew hauls in before 8 and hauls back out by noon — every single Sunday, for three years running.
Every Sunday, we prove we can pack a whole church into a trailer and still feel like a church when the lights go down. That’s not a workaround. It’s the point.