Lodge as Lab Part 2: The Mentor Program

Well, to toot my Lodge's horn, I looked at the newest edition of the Minnesota Mason. The Minnesota Mason is our bimonthly Masonic paper and is a wonderfully put together publication. On the last page, there is a list of all the Master Masons raised in Minnesota. Corinthian Lodge No.67 had raised 10 Master Masons last year. What's even better is that we were one of eight lodges to accomplish raising ten or more Master Masons out of the 101 lodges that raised at least one brother last year.

As Worshipful Master, I really wanted to provide two goals, 1.) improve our programs by trying new things and 2.) utilize the Grand Lodge of Minnesota Mentor program. But as I have explained before, it isn't the Master that gets the job done, it's the Craft and I can safely say that the officers' corps and new brothers really raised the bar last year.

To go into some background, Corinthian Lodge No. 67 is a smaller lodge in a small town 45 minutes from downtown Minneapolis. Even with how far away we are from downtown Minneapolis, we have seen growth in membership. Why? We started focusing on our members, from the 60 year member to the newest Master Mason.

Bro. Wayne was instrumental as our membership/mentoring coordinator. Every lodge has a Lodge Education Officer but few have a Mentoring Coordinator. This job is as critical to maintain interest in the Craft as the LEO. Now I know that this statement is rather bold but here is why he is essential. The LEO is for the betterment of the Craft but what of the individual Mason? We need to make sure that the new Master Mason receive a helping hand from those already Masons. He needs a link to the lodge, a friend that can guide him not merely through degrees but also through life.

I am a product of mentoring. My mentor is one of the wise men I have ever known, a man that represents everything right in being a Mason. W.Bro. Don is one of my heroes as a man and as a Mason. The guidance he showed me not merely in the ritual but in life itself had made me the leader that I was during my term. I was proud to have him as my installing marshal and when he placed the square on my neck, I saw it as a passing of the square from one Master to another. To sum up, mentoring works.

The Grand Lodge has a great mentoring program that I have mentioned in previous posts. However, I cannot overstate just how important I found the mentor program. We now have an engaged Craft that is ready to do the work. Mentoring is an experiment that was truly successful. Bravo to my mother lodge, we did it.

If you want to look at the mentoring program for the Grand Lodge of Minnesota, visit their website.

The Work - Life - Masonic Balance

I know I've been away for another stretch but I promise that I'll be back to form throwing new ideas and events for the Craft to digest. The main reason why I have been out is that my wife and I have been blessed by the birth of our son, Xavier. This has led me to ask an important question, how does Masonry fit in my life now?

In an office setting, there is a common theme of Work - Life Balance. The idea is that the employee expects that life and work may interfere with each other but that in the end, both your work and your life will eventually balance out and the employee will be happy the balance.
I have attempted to balance my work and my life with my son and I am starting to feel a happy balance between them. Of course, work and life with my family is important but I am also a member of this great Fraternity. That brings me to my concern which I believe I share with many of my readers, how does Masonry fit?
After my son was born, I didn't know when I would be able to come back to Lodge and frankly, I didn't really care. This little boy, this perfect child, was my only concern. I was home for a few weeks on leave and I couldn't think of a day away from him. Of course, that didn't last for more than a week.

You see, we all need breaks. As I rounded week one and was running on just a few hours of sleep each day, I needed a place to go. As if the Great Architect knew I needed this break from daily family life, a second degree was coming up at my mother lodge and thankfully, I'm the only one who knows the long lecture in my Lodge. So I went and it was perfect. The Tyler's door was closed and the world outside was closed to the inside. I was able to see old friends and shake hands with the new Fellow Crafts. I was able to teach the lessons of Masonry in the degree that exudes Masonic education more than any other degree. I was working. When I got home, I chatted with my son, and continued to read to him before he went to sleep for the night (by night, I mean two hours.)

Now that I am back to work, I am again having to learn how to balance every aspect of my life. When it was baby and Masonry, there were two choices. Now I have work to throw me off balance. But I'm learning. Each of these parts should not serve as a distraction for the others. Each is a part of me and should be equally important to me.

Masonic life can be hectic. In my own Grand Lodge, a brother could go to a different lodge every day of the week (except Sunday) within a 25 mile radius. Add to that the Rites, Star, and Shrine, and his schedule could be locked up for months. Many Masons fall into this trap. They become enraptured with the ritual or the new found social group and soon, other aspects of his life start to be ignore. Our ritual teaches not to but we, as rough ashlars, can't help it.

Every meeting for me now involves a weighing of my duties. I check with my wife on if she needs me more. I check with what I have left to do at work. At the end of the day, that's all I can do. The lodge will always be there, and they will always need me to help but sometimes, my family will need me more. So that is where I'm at. But again, I'm learning and I think the lessons of Masonry are helping me to find this balance and teaching me how to best divide my time.

Networked Blogs

As I am apt to do, I checked networkedblogs.com. If you are unaware of networkedblogs, you're missing a great way to find interesting blogs that you can follow right on Facebook or Twitter. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my blog is ranked fourth in the freemasonry topic. So yeah, I guess I have that going for me. Anyway, all the blogs in that topic are great and I would recommend that you follow all of them. The wealth of information on freemasonry on the Internet is just astounding. If you are a blog owner, get on networkedblogs and boost your traffic.

Masonic Restoration Foundation Website Redux

The Masonic Restoration Foundation is an organization dedicated to improving the Craft through a list of best practices and education and they have just updated their website. For a lodge to be recognized as a Traditional Observance Lodge, it must adhere to those standards found in the Masonic Restoration Foundation Manifesto. If you are fortunate enough to live in a Grand Lodge jurisdiction with a lodge that follows the Traditional Observance model, you must pay a visit to it. I live in Minnesota and one of the greatest experiences I have had is visiting Saint Paul Three, the Traditional Observance Lodge here. Even if your Lodge does not want to follow the TO model, aspiring to its goals will improve your lodge.

Of course, in a broader sense, I see many lodges trying new and innovative practices. (innovative does not mean an innovation so those that are freaking out, breathe.) When I was Master of Corinthian Lodge in Farmington, I pushed for the third degree to be performed separately for each candidate. I have noticed higher retention rates of our new Master Masons. In fact, in Minnesota alone, I notice every lodge from the small country lodge to the new affinity lodges succeeding. And isn't that what we need at the end of the day, a push away from the old standards of boring business meetings and coffee after the meeting with everyone running home and replaced with a striving for education, improvement, and the sharing of the Fraternal spirit.

What does your lodge do to improve Masonry? Leave a comment below and let's start a dialog.

Guest Article: Internet Age Masonry: The Working Tools of Communication

Brother Matthew Gallagher has again been gracious enough to present his craft for the betterment of the Craft. He is the Lodge Education Officer of Braden Lodge No. 168 A.F. & A.M. in Saint Paul.

Freemasonry is often inaccurately referred to as a secret society. We’re not, but it’s undeniable that we’re something similar: a private club.

There’s a strong case to be made for keeping even mundane Masonic business on the down low. Excusing yourself to a private corner of the room to conduct your mysterious Masonic affairs is undeniably cool, and that coolness is valuable. Saly, however, the hesitance of Masons to discuss any part of Masonry has taken it off the public stage to the point where you’re much more likely to get a “Huh?” in return for telling people you’re a Mason than any sour looks of resentment for what a terrible job we’re doing controlling the world and keeping the Martians under wraps.

How, or even whether we should promote Freemasonry is a topic of debate, but for those potential brothers who are already interested in becoming a Mason, what can they find out about your lodge? What gets them to knock on your door as opposed to any other lodge in the area?

Just as operative masons have dozens of tools to help them erect quality, functional buildings, the Internet provides hundreds of tools to help us erect quality, functional lodges, but these tools aren’t interchangeable. They each have a specific purpose. Here is a list of tools you have at your disposal to support awareness of your lodge, and how they are best utilized.

Facebook

If you’re reading this blog post, you probably already know what Facebook is (if not, please ask). Over a billion people worldwide use Facebook, including many Freemasons and as such it makes an excellent venue for keeping both our brothers and the public connected and informed. There are two ways to do this: Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups.

Facebook Pages are designed to promote an organization. They’re completely public, and updates appear in users’ news feeds. People following a Masonic Facebook page will be a mix of your lodge brothers, brothers from other lodges, and the public so it makes an ideal medium for provoking conversation on Masonic topics which we can discuss, which frankly is most of them.

Facebook Groups are different. They’re not used for promotion, but for collaboration. Group updates don’t show up in a user’s news feed, so users have to go right to the group page to contribute to any discussions, which makes them easy to forget about. The big benefits of Groups, however, is that you can set them so that any members must be approved, and you can message all members of the group at one time, which sends the note directly to their message inbox, and frequently their email inbox as well. This makes Groups ideal for informing brothers and friends of your lodge about specific events that require quick action.

So which should your lodge have, a page or a group? Both! They each serve a different purpose, and should both be in your lodge’s toolkit.

Blogs

Blogs are usually wrapped around a theme, like millennial masonry, but you can also wrap one around your lodge. At my lodge’s blog we’re not just casually chronicling dates and events, we try to exemplify our philosophy and unique culture in every post we make. Our goal is that anyone who has heard of Braden Lodge should be able to go here and learn exactly who we are.

WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad, are the top blogging tools, and unlike websites, they’re easy for anyone to figure out; no coding required.

Flickr

Photo storage sites have been around for a long time, but Flickr stands out by being a searchable database of peoples’ lives. Creative use of tags (searchable keywords for labeling photos) can mean that prospective brothers can learn about your lodge without ever knowing about your lodge in the first place. If your lodge skips rocks down at the St. Paul Curling Club, someone searching for “st. paul curling” will find you, letting you attract potential brothers by virtue of the activities you do, not just because you’re Freemasons.

Ning

Message boards have been around pretty much since the Internet began. While they will continue to be useful for collaboration and community, their big draw back is their top-down control by the administrators. You play in their backyard, and creativity and collaboration can suffer. Think of it like conducting lodge business. When decisions need to be made, is a stated meeting always the best venue for that? Often ideas are realized through smaller, independent teams, and it’s the same way on the Internet.

Ning is a tool that allows anyone to make a social network of their very own. Sort of like if the entirety of Facebook was all about your lodge. The thing I love about Ning is anyone in it can create their own groups, which others on the network can join. Brothers can create their own committees and interest groups, letting them more easily collaborate away from the lodge than they can with basic email or message boards.

Twitter

Because Twitter posts are limited to 144 characters, the average user will have no trouble following the day-to-day happenings of 400 people or more. Because people are willing to subject themselves to endless streams of information, Twitter excels as a marketing tool. Its usefulness to a lodge, however, is in direct proportion to the effort put into it. Using Twitter effectively means using it a lot, and forming relationships with other users. If you can do this, it’s a great tool for promoting lodge events to masons and non-masons alike. If you can’t do this, it’ll sit there and collect internet dust.

FourSquare

Another micro-tool, FourSquare is all about location-based advertising. When you go to any public place you can whip out your phone and “check in”, which tells anyone who’s looking exactly where you are at that moment. Believe it or not, this has its uses. If your brothers are avid users, FourSquare is great for initiating out-of-lodge fellowship.

It’s also an advertising tool. If a guy is hanging out at Brit’s Pub and checks in, seeing an account called Mpls19masons checking in frequently at the same place might get him wondering just what the Freemasons are up to nowadays.

There are hundreds out there. Some are effective, some aren’t. And some are MySpace, which should probably be avoided by all civilized people. Use the tools that are right for you and your lodge, but remember, even in the Information Age, it’s still hard to be found if you don’t want to be found, and to those lodges that do, what are you doing to make that happen?