Cloverdale Church of Christ will host a wild game potluck Sunday evening with an invitation to all who hunt or are hungry.
Beast Feast, a Cloverdale tradition since 2006, will be at 5 p.m. at the church building after the evening service. All are invited to join and/or bring food to the event.
Cloverdale church’s elder of fellowship Greg Niblock said he and deacon of fellowship Scott Biddle work together to organize the dinner and encourage the hunters in the church to save some of their game for the feast.
“And of course there’s lots of folks that don’t hunt, and I’ll say, you know, ‘We’ll consider cow meat,” Niblock said. “So the focus is to see what wild game we can bring, and since it’s a potluck, people will bring in other dishes that might be their favorite thing to eat at a potluck.”
Biddle said this is his first year helping organize the event and that he is excited about the possibility.
“It’s an opportunity for everyone to come together and have fellowship with their church family,” Biddle said. “It’s an opportunity for everyone to potentially try some foods they haven’t tried before, and it’s an opportunity for the whole congregation to just enjoy each other’s company and step back and have a good time.”
Niblock said they will try to have a hunting theme with camouflage tables and napkins, duck decoys, and older guns. He said he thinks it is a good representation of the Bible passage in Acts when God said, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
“I think the Beast Feast is sort of reflective of who Cloverdale is as a church,” Niblock said. “We’re not all professors; we’re not all professionals; we’re not all blue collar; we’re not all retired. It’s a big mix of people, and this gets everybody together.”
Pulpit minister Karl McLarty said one thing that drew him to Cloverdale before he started ministering there was the Beast Feast.
“To me, we spend way too much time stuck inside, and some of that we can’t help, but I think when people get outside there’s a sense of connecting to the creation of God — the grandeur of God,” McLarty said. “Creation just has a way of reawakening within us some of that beauty and mystery and wonder that’s all around us that God put there.”
