Revitalization in Masonry

Unfortunately, we have not had any new candidates for several months now.  The one new member was from a younger guy whose work had him transferred to this area and he has transferred into our lodge.  Back when I joined in the mid 1990s my lodge had over a thousand members, sadly we are now down to about half that.  It's the same 25 to 40 brethren who are active and participating in meetings and events.  On a brighter note, we have never repeated a W.M.  in the last 95 years of the lodge's existence.

I wish the membership would focus more on attrition issues.

I feel the same way. In the same time period my lodge raised 13 new brothers we had 26 demits. Focusing on getting bodies, for us at least, is a waste of time. We need to focus on keeping them. The average time between raising and leaving has been six years for us.

As I've said in other forums, young men are telling lodges what they are looking for. Hell some are even writing books about it. If you fail to listen at some point they will stop talking. I about make grand lodge meeting come to a halt with I said this. The sad and unpopular truth is: if our lodges were worth attending people would attend. The Freemason machine needs to take input and needs to do so quickly.

I am terribly sorry if this stole your thunder brother as that is a great amount of petitions.

FYI: this was a reply to Coach but for some reason the quote didn't show up.

Edited by goomba - March/06/2017 at 11:02pm

For the past 5 years, I have been presenting a short (about 5 to 7 minutes in length) piece of Masonic education at my lodge's monthly meetings.  Several brethren have told me that they enjoy my presentations and that they always learn something.  Last month, the WM of the lodge a few miles away from my lodge asked me to come and do one of my presentations and it was well received.  Such presentations don't necessarily have people wanting to attend meetings but I believe they do add to our Masonic enlightenment.

This year has started out a little slower than last year up in the 25th District, but last year was very good. So good that I had two Chance to Advance (C2A) classes in one year! For those of you not in Missouri, the C2A class is a program where EAs can go all the way to MM in one day. These classes feature some fairly intense Masonic education which is usually done by Grand Lodge officers, up to and including the Grand Master. My first class in January had 18 candidates and the second class in November had 20 candidates. No, these were not all from one lodge but from several lodges from eastern and central Missouri.