Clear thinking and a firm grip on reality are essential requirements for creating and sustaining virbant, socially relevant lodges. All activites of the lodge require careful planning to ensure that they respect the integrity of participants, enhance their lives, expand choices, and cultivate creativity and individuality.

People join interesting lodges that promise to fulfill their needs. They resign if they decide the lodge is deceptive, defective, dangerous, or opposes basic values of society.

Successful lodges strive to behave ethically, endorse basic human rights, and provide choice without undue, coercive influence. For a sane, healthy, and harmonious lodge to be possible, we must be very honest with ourselves and each other, and engender leadership (not merely followership) in others, bringing out the best in each and all of us.

Unselfishness, kindness, gentleness, and compassion should be a basic living principle, not just an ideal.

Seek to contribute to others, not to convert others.

Motivation and intention are determining factors in the result of our actions.

Behaviors must be scrutinized in order to protect human liberty. The following behaviours are to be discouraged:

• repressing dissent;
• devaluing outsiders;
• depending too much on leaders and authority figures;
• seeking totalistic solutions to existential problems;
• feeling superior and even self-righteous;
• resisting the wish of leave-takers to depart,

A legitimate question or concern demands a respectful response, not evasion or coersion

Do not allow 'Custom and Practice'' to impede sensible adaption to a style that suits the members

Develop SMART Objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed) to produce a reasonable chance of commitment and success. This will require "Internal Openness" not only about what has been done and what might be done.

We all live in an age of communication, surrounded by it, bombarded by it - let us use those skills and enthusiasm to enable others to hone their thoughts and ideas for the good of the Craft!

reality check

In English speaking lodges around the world there has been no change over the last fifty years in:

• the average age of men joining freemasonry - about 40
• the average time masters have been freemasons - about 10 years
• the average resignation rate - about half the men who join resign
• the average number of candidates in a lodge - about 10 every five years

preservation does not mean stagnation
We are part of our own age. We must make ourselves better known within our communities, because we are part of the social fabric that knits people together in peace. How can a son follow in his father's steps if the father leaves no trail?

back to in the news . . .