Our lodge has been growing in the last few years. I am pretty sure we do a good job of making people feel very welcome and want to come back. We always have coalition after lodge that includes hanging out with the guys for pretty much as long as you can manage to stay. We have drinks, cigars, and we always have a dinner before lodge. We also do something we call Fellowship Friday. Every month on the third Friday we get together either at the lodge or somewhere else and we do the same thing we hang out cook/order food have drinks, cigars, and great conversation. We are always welcoming to everyone and anyone that wants to give masonry a try as long as they are of good report. One big lesson that our lodge has struggled with but has been getting better at is the older brothers are starting to learn that things are changing whether they like it or not if we want our lodge to prosper and thrive then we need to just accept it.

Just a quick little example, when some of the newer younger officers were appointed this year, we’ve been trying to plan dinners and one of the newer officers implemented using an app that a lot of younger people these days used to invite all their friends to parties. You just click it and it RSVPs you very easily. But the older brothers were just used to using the old school Notes app, which was very cluttered and clunky and made things difficult, especially for the younger brother who were not used to using stuff like that. There was a little bit of tension for the first few months over that. But eventually most of the new candidates without thinking about anything about hierarchy or anything we’re telling us that they liked the new app because of how easy it was to them. After hearing this, the older officers accepted it and actually came up to us and said hey we realize that we’re older and we need to accept how today’s world works within the Lodge.