In January of 2006, Park City, Utah, was host city for the 25th anniversary of the prestigious Sundance Film Festival as well as for the second annual Windrider Forum - a unique event cosponsored by Fuller Theological Seminary, Biola University, Priddy Brothers Entertainment and Angelus Student Film Festival (a program of Family Theater Produtions.) The forum gives students an opportunity to use one of the independent film industry's most influential festivals as a class lab for the investigation into film, culture, and faith.

Participants viewed selected films, engaged in discussion about them - often with the directors and screenwriters - and attended classes in theology and film offered in conjunction with Fuller's Colorado Springs extension campus. The class, taught by Biola mass communications head and Fuller PhD candidate Craig Detweiler, was rich with dialogue, guided by Detweiler's considerable experience as a practitioner and aficionado of film. Detweiler, who screened a rough cut of his new documentary Purple State of Mind at the forum, was able to draw several filmmakers from the festival to the church for private Q&A sessions and extended conversations.

Windrider is the formal incarnation of talks begun some years ago between Detweiler and Colorado Springs campus director Will Stoller-Lee. While brainstorming about how to successfully merge two powerhouse evangelical educational institutions with a film festival that shapes popular culture, Windrider director-to-be Bob Huckins arranged to visit local pastor and old friend, Lenny Perata of the Mountain Vineyard Church in Park City. Both men would come to see the meeting as an answer to prayer. "For years," Perata says, "we tried to figure out how to integrate our ministry with the folks who come from all over the world for the festival. Yet year after year, it seemed as though 70,000 strangers came to the city and left as strangers."

Though approached by festival organizers for use as much-needed screening space, the church often found itself at odds with the content of festival selections. The church quickly offered to host the Windrider Forum, however, giving it a prime location in the city during the festival, and making the experience affordable to students who stay in the homes of church members for the duration of the 6-day intensive. As the hub of the Windrider Forum, Mountain Vineyard serves as church, theater, meeting place, concert hall, banquet room, screening room, and even cafeteria.

On the second year of the forum's nascent existence, the nearly 100 attendees included a mixture of seminary students, staff and guests from Fuller, students and staff from Biola University, award-winning student filmmakers from the Angelus Student Film Festival, members of the Mountain Vineyard Church in Park City, members of the Priddy Brothers Entertainment from Boise, Idaho, and guest filmmakers. Windrider was the largest single group to attend Sundance, with many convinced that impromptu conversations with other filmgoers and filmmakers fulfilled a larger intention to infuse faith into the conversation surrounding independent film.

"The Windrider Forum allows for cross-fertilization between a new generation of filmmakers and theologians, giving both a richer, more eclectic experience," claims John Priddy of Priddy Brothers Entertainment, who are also sponsors of the forum.

The weekend that marked the end of both the film festival and the Windrider Forum was marked by a series of special events open to the public as well as students: Friday night was a packed-house screening of the Priddys' documentary 39 Pounds of Love with the filmmakers in attendance; on Saturday the Mountain Vineyard hosted the Angelus Awards, screening award winning films with Q&A panels moderated by Angelus Director Monika Moreno; and on Sunday was a screening of documentary Laundry and Tosca with its subject, lirico-spinto soprano Marcia Whitehead, giving a mini-concert for churchgoers.

"This is precisely the sort of event that the Brehm Center exists to promote," says Brehm Center Executive Director Fred Davison, who attended Windrider again this year with his wife and Brehm Center principal Dottie Davison. "We are actively engaging here at Park City, adding the voice of faith to the culture of our times, while exposing students to a world of culture previously inaccessible to them."

Editorial note: We join with Mountain Vineyard, Priddy Brothers Entertainment, Angelus Student Film Festival, and Biola University in mourning the sudden death of Windrider Director Bob Huckins, who suffered a fatal heart attack a short while after this event. Our deepest condolences to his family and to others who loved him as we did.