Chloe Smith (right) displays her Manchurian sika deer alongside Keith Heldreth.
Linda Costa (far left) and her two daughters, Nicole and Meagan, with a Manchurian sika deer.
Five different types of meat — bison, deer, moose, black bear and cougar — will be served during the Feb. 1 ‘Beast Feast’ gathering at the Fairgrounds’ Blue Pavilion facility, where Keith Heldreth and company will preach the virtues of accountability to 600 male guests.
In planning for the occasion, Heldreth — a pastor at the Riverwood Baptist Church in Chehalis — and a group of nine local women and girls, consisting of three mothers and six young women, joined forces on a hunting expedition in The Dalles, Oregon in which each participant was given the opportunity to claim one of the wild animals.
Each member of the contingent will be among the few women on hand at the February dinner, which will feature guest speaker Wilson Calvin, a Navajo pastor, who following the hearty serving of meat, beans and desert, will preach “what it means to be a man” to the audience.
“The message I would like for him to get across is the same one I’ve been preaching to men for 26 years: Men, be the man in your family. Quit taking a pass on life. God designed you as the leader of your family — stand up and lead,” said Heldreth, who noted a decreasing male presence in many American families and the toll its taking on their children.
During his interview with The Chronicle, the 60-year-old Heldreth — himself a happily married father of two children and four grandchildren—spoke of his many encounters with individuals, he said, are in need of guidance. He recounted a recent conversation he had with one absentee parent who is fathering three children with three different women, who reportedly was trying to “figure out” why each of the mothers was having issues raising the youngsters.
“I said, ‘Are you kidding me? You can’t figure that out?’ I think men don’t know what their spiritual job is in life,” he observed, as he went on to indicate how a high rate of local children now qualify as homeless and in many cases resort to sleeping on a friend’s couch or a neighbor’s floor to make sure they have a roof over their heads at night.
The fading male presence in American families has only worsened over the past 100 years, according to Heldreth. He attributed the issue to a “rapid degeneration of morals” rooted in a continually widening range of misdeeds and transgressions that routinely go unpunished nowadays. Some of those same actions, he said, would have been condemned in the not-so-distant past.
As in past years, there is no price of admission for the upcoming “Beast Feast.” Furthermore, the church isn’t requesting any donations on the part of attendees. Any monetary contributions received will reportedly be used to help support Possibilities Women’s Center, a Centralia-based clinic offering free pregnancy testing.
The following year’s dinner will see hundreds of women being served in what’s known as the “Beauty and the Beast Feast,” with a slightly different menu that will still include an assortment of wild game.
As for the females that helped facilitate the February “Beast Feast,” Heldreth described how he taught them how to operate a firearm on his Chehalis ranch months before the Oct. 1 hunting trip.
He compared the novice teenage girls first picking up a rifle to “teaching a monkey how to do a puzzle,” as he provided step-by-step instructions on how to breathe, how to squeeze the trigger and how to “sight” and adjust a rifle to accurately hit its target.
“The very first (lesson) I teach them is safety because when you’re dealing with a high-powered weapon, that’s paramount,” added Heldreth, who along with being a long-time avid hunter, also boasts a wealth of experience as a logger and timber buyer.
During the trip to Oregon, the group was also taught how to skin and gut an animal before the carcasses are frozen for future consumption.
“These girls got a story to tell about their experience and what it means to them,” said Heldreth, who reflected that he’s been taking teenage girl out hunting for so long that he’ll now run into a few of them who are now in their mid-thirties.
In past trips, the pastor has led hunting expeditions out to Wyoming for elk and as far off as Louisiana, where he and his group rustled up alligators.
All the meat gathered during his most recent excursion, he assured, will be eaten, as entrees will be served hot at about 5 p.m. Prize giveaways will take place later that evening, with a few rifles among the items that will reportedly be raffled off.
When asked if he’s hopeful that sermons from this year’s “Beast Feast” will boost Riverwood’s congregants, Heldreth said his goal is simply get men back in church— any church— with their families.
“We could charge for this thing and make a lot of money. I mean, there’s that much demand for it, but my theory has always been that the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Bible are free and I’m not going to charge them to hear it,” he affirmed.
