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Liberty Bible Church’s wild game dinner draws over 220
More than 225 attend free dinner at Liberty Bible Curch
VIENNA
Liberty Bible Church’s annual free wild-game dinner is a combination of tasty food – mostly venison meatloaf, roast, chili, stroganoff and Lake Erie perch – and familiar vegetables.
The Saturday event, which attracted more than 225 diners – about a third of those nonchurch members – is primarily an outreach effort as well as a novel meal, said the Rev. Allan McCracken, who founded the church 37 years ago and has been its pastor since.
“We hope they enjoy the fellowship and come back on Sundays,” he said.
In keeping with the Christian theme, one of the speakers was the Rev. Gary Forney, hunter, fisherman, Arctic bush pilot and missionary in Canada’s Northwest Territory, now of New Philadelphia. The other speaker was Vince DeNiro, a firearms entrepreneur, who had a gun display that included assault weapons.
Speaking before the dinner, the Rev. Mr. Forney said he grew up on a farm in Columbiana County where he learned to hunt and trap as a teenager. He became a Christian in 1964 at 19, he said, married his high-school sweetheart, the former Barbara Landsberger, and following God’s call, took her to the Northwest Territory
to minister to the Native Canadians and raise their three children.
One of those children, his daughter Jodine and her husband, missionaries in that same Northwest Territory, joined him at Saturday’s event.
In addition to talking about his adventures in the Northwest Territory, where temperatures reached 65 degrees below zero, Mr. Forney intended to share his experience with “beaver fever,” officially Giardiasis – an infection of the small intestine most often caused by drinking water contaminated by animal feces, diapers and agricultural runoff – as the opening to his talk on “polluting our minds with life-damaging philosophies and beliefs.“
“In other words,” he said, “we succumb to the belief that if it feels good, do it.”
DeNiro, of Columbiana County, who began his career in firearms in 1982 as a teenager loading ammunition for a Hubbard firm, has founded several firearms firms and been a top executive for Beretta firearms company.
He also successfully has fought legislation to ban assault weapons.
“The whole purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution was to enable citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. It’s nonsensical to say citizens should not have the same weapons as that government,” DeNiro said.
Two of the diners, Steve Tyler of Howland and Justin Crawford of Champion, said they enjoyed the wild game meal.
Both hunters, they said they grew up eating this type of food.
“People should give it a try at least once,” Tyler said.