Last summer I spent 6 weeks in Juneau on a summer project with Campus Crusade. After my 6 weeks were up most everything on my list of things to do or see were checked off except one...see a brown bear (or grizzly bear). On a trip to a remote village, to scout out a place where next year the 36 college students on project would go and do some outreach, I was promised by the locals that "there are more brown bears around the village then people, you'll absolutely see a brown bear before you leave." I guess all the brown bears decided to take the day off because I left without seeing a single brown bear. After numerous promises were made that I would see a brown bear turned up empty I began to wonder if brown bears where just mythological creatures, contrived by locals to keep "over-zealous" tourists like me out of the woods.

So when I was perusing the "New Release" section of Blockbuster a couple weeks ago and saw Grizzly Man, I was of course interested.

This documentary, which has won numerous awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a window into the wild and untamed Alaskan wilderness and the massive grizzly bears that call it home. But this movie is more than just a documentary about nature or of Timothy Treadwell, the man who every summer would go and live with these brown bears, "protecting" them from imagined threats from outsiders. I believe this film gives us a unique glance into community and the length to which we go to to be a part of and accepted by a community.

We learn through the movie that Timothy Treadwell was someone that didn't feel at home around his family or in society but considered his tent his home and the bears and foxes his real family. In fact, the reason Timothy returns to the wild late in the season, a decision which eventually leads to his death (being mauled by one of the bears he has sworn to protect) was brought on by an encounter with the airline he was using to fly back home (I do admit though... encounters with airlines sometimes lead me to want to go live with wild bears as well). This movie is a story of a man who could not find a community that would accept him among his own kind and therefore was forced to find it somewhere else...even if it meant finding it with wild animals.

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, in their book The Shaping of Things to Come, pose that community and acceptance are the church's greatest challenges today. They comment that Burning Man, an annual art festival held at Black Rock Desert in Nevada, points the church toward what people, people much like Timothy Treadwell, are seeking. Frost and Hirsch state,

"It (Burning Man) dares to offer acceptance, community, an experience of god, redemption, and atonement. In short, it resembles everything the church is supposed to offer. But many people are finding the transformative power of Burning Man to be far and away more effective than anything they experience in church."

Grizzly Man and what Frost and Hirsch have to say have been challenging to me. Are the churches we are a part of and the ministries we participate in places where the Timothy Treadwell's of the world find acceptance and community...or are they pushed away, forced to find community elsewhere.