UPDATE: Kansas Downsizes and Moves Annual Meeting

UPDATE: AS OF FRIDAY MARCH 20TH, 2020, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED ENTIRELY. 

The Grand Lodge of Kansas is supposed to hold its annual communication next weekend, which comes at this historically awkward moment in time. Like Masonic meetings of all kinds everywhere, they are running smack dab into the Wuhan Coronavirus Panic of 2020 (which feels like the Burning Hair Festival more and more as each day passes). Every day, state governors, health officials, federal agencies and local bureaucrats are announcing their latest reaction, overreaction, and exploding head positions as they grapple with how much to shut down public gatherings and chain all the exits.

If you click to enlarge the notice above, you can see what the Grand Lodge of Kansas has come up with. The large gathering of lodge representatives has been cancelled, and is being downsized and moved from its hotel meeting space in Wichita to Emporia Lodge No. 12 next Friday, March 20th.  They are reducing the number of attendees to the minimum required quorum of just 50 Master Masons total (current grand lodge officers, plus no more or less than 25 sitting Lodge Masters included) in order to elect new grand lodge officers and assure what the feds call continuity of government, or COG (because Washington never met an acronym they didn't like). There will be no business voted on besides approving committee reports – that means no resolutions or other legislation. The new grand officers will be installed, and everybody goes home to resume haggling with rogue toilet paper and hand sanitizer smugglers.

None of this is new. If you peer into most grand lodge by-laws and constitutions, you'll see what your own jurisdiction set up long ago for just such occasions. Masons in earlier times dealt with the "devastations of war" and the "ruthless hand of ignorance" — periods when the nation was at war or other major crisis, as well as during the rabid anti-Masonic period, when ranks of Masons able to attend statewide meetings were reduced to a handful at best. Your grand lodge jurisprudence, rules, and ways and means committees have probably all looked deep into these rules for your jurisdiction by now already, just in case your annual meeting is scheduled for the next few weeks or so. 

If your favorite resolution you slaved over for months to word just right to get your cherished pet peeve in the rules changed, try not to get too upset if it has to wait another year. Masonic governance has always moved with the dazzling speed of a drugged brontosaurus with a full belly on a hot, lazy day anyway. 

Just remember the most important admonition given to the U.S. government within the Constituion itself. The finest words in the entire document are: "Congress shall make no law..." 

Think of all the trouble it would have saved if only they had stopped writing right there.


Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Interview: 'Meet, Act and Part' with Roger S. VanGorden

My friend, Brother, and longtime Masonic mentor, Roger S. VanGorden, was interviewed last week by Bill Hosler, Darin Lahners, and Greg Knott on the Meet, Act and Part podcast about the Masonic Renewal Committee and the Be A Freemason public awareness campaign. 

If you aren't familiar with Roger, you really should be. He's a Past Grand Master of Indiana, the founding President of the Masonic Society, and he's been a tireless champion for the fraternity for over four decades now. His program for the MRC about improving Stated Meetings is excellent.

Roger isn't just spitballing somebody else's ideas. His concepts and recommendations have been borne out of direct experience with resurrecting at least two formerly foundering lodges, helping to create a new one from scratch, plus steering countless local appendant body chapters or groups. After every Masonic meeting for as long as I've known him, his overriding concern is always, "How did you feel the meeting went?" He wants to know what worked, what didn't, what was good, what was dull, did everyone like the food, and did everyone enjoy themselves. Most of all, was the lodge or other group providing the very best possible experience for its members? And he is a firm believer in constantly communicating with members.

"All Freemasonry is local," has been Roger's mantra since the day I met him, and I've never found any evidence to convince me otherwise. For the last several years, he's been taking his evangel about fixing stated meetings on the road, and he's been trying to influence the guys who can do the most good with the message. He's given programs at the last few Conferences of Grand Masters in the hopes that grand masters will steal the ideas and claim them as their own. But nothing precludes anyone from acting. Take it upon yourself to fix your lodge and your meetings, and your membership worries will begin to fade.
(You should see an inline player below, but if not here's the link:)


Listen to "Meet, Act and Part Episode 4-MWB Roger S. VanGorden" on Spreaker.

Over the last two years, the Scottish Rite Northern Masonic Jurisdiction's comprehensive "Not Just A Man. A Mason." advertising campaign for Craft Freemasonry has been enthusiastically adopted all across the U.S. and elsewhere by grateful grand lodges and individual lodges alike. Not content to rest on their laurels, the campaign has launched an entire website dedicated to explaining just who and what Freemasons are, what we stand for, and how to join in your state or community. 

The new website www.beafreemason.org is co-sponsored by the Scottish Rite Northern and Southern Jurisdictions of the Scottish Rite, as well as Shriners International, and it builds off of the Not Just A Man, A Mason campaign. The new site is tasteful, well written, well conceived, and beautifully executed. It is deliberately generic enough so that any grand lodge jurisdiction, local lodge, or even appendant body can confidently direct the public to it to effectively explain and promote the fraternity, and provide a way to seek more information about joining a lodge.