Masonic Resource: Paul Bessel's Website

As a follow-up to my previous post Masonic Education Programs Basics, I will be writing a series of articles focusing on various Masonic Resources on the web. These resources should help brothers to get ideas for Masonic Education Programs and to serve as resources for these programs.

One of the best Masonic Resources on the internet is the website created and maintained by Brother Paul Bessel. Brother Bessel is a Past Senior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge of Washington DC and holds a multitude of honors (all of which can be found here). He is an author of a wide variety of Masonic books, articles, talks and papers. His knowledge of the craft is impressive, but his willingness to spread this knowledge to others and to take the time to make this knowledge available on the internet is truly extraordinary.

Since 1998, he has faithful compiled a site that pulls together his original Masonic research, statistics from the Masonic Service Association, information from Grand Lodges around the globe and much, much more. All of this information can be an invaluable resource for Worshipful Masters and other brothers who need to develop a program for a stated communication. Here are just a few papers and articles listed on his site that would make great presentations to a lodge for Masonic Education:

• Freemasonry and Pearl Harbor
  
• Masons at the Battle of Gettysburg
  and the Masonic Friend to Friend Monument
  
• Freemasonry and Judaism
  
• Freemasons & the U.S. Constitution
  
• Paul Revere - His Ride & Associations with Freemasonry
  
• U.S. Capitol Cornerstone Laying Ceremony
  

Overall, this is a great site with lots of information. As a warning, the navigation of the page can be a bit tricky at times and it still has the look and feel of a website from 1998 (No special CSS, social features or anything Web 2.0-like). A brother can literally spend hours or days looking through the site, finding out something new with each click of the mouse. Spend some time there, learn something new and bring it back to your lodge!

Tis the season for installations

Today marks the beginning of the Masonic Officer Installation Season for me. Today I'll be attending Temple Lodge No. 16's Installation in Cheshire, Connecticut. Here is the schedule of Installations for this week:

Temple Lodge No. 16 - Sunday, Jan 2nd at 2:00 PM

Ashlar Lodge No. 332 - Monday, Jan 3rd at 6:00 PM

Adelphi Momauguin Lodge No. 63 - Tuesday, Jan 4th at 7:30 PM

Ansantawae Lodge No. 89 - Friday, Jan 7th at 6:00 PM

Annawon Lodge No. 115 - Sunday, Jan 9th at 3:00 PM

These are the installations on my calendar as of right now, which is subject to change. There may be a few more added by tonight.

I recommend to all Masons to go out and visit the installations of officers for the lodges in your area. You'll get to meet the new Worshipful Masters and their officers, and hear about the plans set for the coming year. In addition the excitement of a lodge is at its peak during an installation and excitement is contagious!

Masonic Education Programs Basics

In 2005 and 2006, when I was Worshipful Master of Adelphi Momauguin Lodge No 63, I added several education programs to our standard schedule of Stated Communications. If we were not doing a degree, then we were doing some sort of Masonic Education program.

Having the element of Masonic Education is essential to the lifeblood of a Masonic lodge. If all a Worshipful Master does during a meeting is read minutes and pay bills, why would our brethren want to keep coming to meeting after boring meeting? Masons join masonry to receive "light" and a Worshipful Master's job is to give "light". This is not limited to degreework.

Most lodges in Connecticut meet twice a month throughout the year with the exception of the summer. Removing degrees, the annual meeting and the awards night, it typically means that a Worshipful Master has between 10 and 12 nights that he must plan a program for. This can feel like a daunting task for some brothers.

In an attempt to help brothers who are apprehensive about putting together Masonic Education Programs, I have compiled the following list of tips to help:

• The content of a program does not have to be original. Referencing someone else's work or reading someone else's content is completely acceptable. For example, reading Rudyard Kipling's The Mother Lodge and leading a discussion about it would be a fine program with no original content.
  
• The content of a program does not have to be new. Although you may have heard the topic before, it doesn't mean your lodge has. Even if a brother has heard the topic before, you might have new information or a different viewpoint about it, which will be enjoyable for that brother to hear.
  
• You can use the internet. Finding "good" Masonic Education is not constrained to dusty old books. The internet is literally filled with thousands of Masonic papers and topics. When in doubt, go to google.com and type in "Masonic Education", "Masonic Programs" or "Masonic Papers". You'll find tons of resources at your disposal.
  
• The Worshipful Master sets the schedule, but he can delegate the program to another brother. If your Senior Deacon is reading a book on King Solomon's Temple, ask him to lead a short lodge program on the description of King Solomon's Temple in the bible. Most officers and brothers would love to have the opportunity to lead a program in lodge. Delegation is a vastly under-appreciated leadership strategy in Masonic lodges, when it is by far one of the most important strategies there are in organizational leadership.
  
• It doesn't have to be long. Many people believe that a program must be 30 minutes long or some other amount of time. A concise and interesting topic is much better than a long and boring topic. Some of the best Masonic Education Programs I've seen were less than five minutes long.
  

Overall Masonic Education Programs don't have to be difficult to put together. They can be recycled, borrowed, short and done by someone else. Don't get overwhelmed by trying to put together the "perfect" program. Any program is better than just reading minutes and paying bills.

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Masonic Technology: Call Em' All

During the past year, the Grand Lodge of Connecticut began an initiative that encouraged their lodges to use a technology called "Call Em All". Call Em All is a service that allows a admin user to set up a call list of phone numbers and record a single message. The service then calls all the numbers on the list and plays the recorded message. Our Grand Lodge paid for the accounts for all the lodges in Connecticut and automatically set up their call lists based on the lodges' membership roll.

The lodges can use this service to record messages to go out to all of it's members. Examples of this includes:

• Stated Communication Reminders
  
• Master's Messages
  
• Event Announcements
  
• Funeral Notifications
  
• Monthly Birthday Lists
  
• Calendar Updates
  
• Masonic Education
  

This list of ideas is by no means comprehensive. There are tons of ways that lodges could use this service. Lodges within our Grand Jurisdiction have been using it for several months now and many lodges are seeing an increase in meeting attendance and activity.

For lodges outside of my Grand Jurisdiction, who do not have the service automatically paid for, the service is relatively inexpensive and costs between five and ten cents a call, which is far cheaper than printing and mailing a notice. There are also bulk rates for the same list if used several times a month. More information on pricing can be found here.

This service is a great way to reduce costs and to reach out to members that do not have standard electronic communication, such as email. If a receiver of a call doesn't wish to receive more notifications, the recording has an option to opt out of additional calls.

My lodge has been using Call Em All for about two months now and we plan to use it heavily in the coming year. What other purposes could we use this for? I'd love to hear some additional ideas.

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New Year - New Purpose

For those of you who are long time readers of Masonic Renaissance, you'll recall the previously tackled topics of this blog; technology, leadership, and educational resources, all from the perspective of a Masonic Lodge.

With the advent of the new year, I hope to reinvigorate this blog. The topics of the blog will remain the same and most of the format will stay the same. However, the purpose of the blog will be slightly altered.

Previously, I wrote this blog with the intent that the audience was the whole of the Masonic Fraternity and specifically, the like-minded brothers who wanted to breath new life into their dusty halls. This was a great exercise, where I was able to experiment with some new ideas and get great feedback from brothers around the globe.




In April, I will be installed as a District Deputy of the 4th Masonic District in Connecticut. Our incoming Grand Master is a prolific Masonic Leader and wants to use his District Deputies to assist lodges in generating new programs, fostering Masonic Education and using technology to their advantage. In an effort to assist my local lodges in my jurisdiction, I plan to focus the audience of this blog specifically to them and align my topics with the initiatives our Grand Master is promoting.

Overall, this won't change the blog very much, but it will mean more frequent posting. The blog will still cover the same topics and will aim to help Masonic Lodges to grow and prosper. The specific ideas that I will be promoting for the lodges I work directly with can just as easily be used by lodges around the globe.

I also hope to use the blog to promote the happenings around the district and to chronicle my travels. For the past two years, I've accompanied my predecessor, Right Worshipful Ted Doolittle, on this travels throughout the district as Associate Grand Marshal and I've seen some really wonderful programs. These programs should be shared, so that other lodges can adopt them and adapt them.

I truly look forward to beginning this next leg of my Masonic journey and I sincerely hope that the readers of this blog will enjoy virtually traveling with me.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Technology Experiment: Blogging from the iPad

It's been a while since I last posted on this blog. Unfortunately, the past year has been extremely busy in my Masonic, personal and vocational lives, which has made it difficult to add content. However, I do plan on reactivating this blog in the near future. The new focus of the blog will be to help brethren, both locally and around the globe, to find Masonic resources on the web and to identify technologies that could assist with enriching the Masonic experience. I'll have more information on this initiative and the reason behind it in a follow-up post.

One of the new tools that I hope to employ with helping me to become a more active blogger is my iPad. Today, I downloaded some software for my iPad that should help me post on-the-go easier. This is the first post using this software and I hope it makes it to it's intended destination.

One of the cool features of this software is being able to see the location of the post. If I was at a lodge meeting and there was something important occurring, I could add a post and the location of the event will appear. Right now, I'm in a cabin in the woods during my vacation.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Abner Ln,Killingworth,United States

Facebook is a Useful Tool for Lodges, Too

This blog post is a reprinting of an article that I wrote and was published in the January 2010 issue of the Connecticut Freemasons Newspaper.

The November issue of Connecticut Freemasons included an article that introduced Facebook, the social networking site that has taken the internet by storm. A December Connecticut Freemasons article showed how a timely interchange could involve several people, sharing opinions and thoughts. A Masonic lodge can also use Facebook to bring its members together, by sharing announcements, discussions, and information.

People use social networking sites to connect with others and to talk about the things that they are interested in. Facebook users come together to discuss books, holidays, movies, school events, and countless other topics. Our brothers are excited about Masonry and about their lodges, so they are naturally drawn to Facebook to learn more about others’ experiences in Masonry and to share their own. Since its beginning, brethren have met together on the internet to exchange ideas and discuss how Masonry is practiced in their various jurisdictions and lodges.

So how can your lodge use Facebook to inspire its brothers and help excite them into action? First, you need a central presence on Facebook. For this presence, there are two options: Pages and Groups. Pages and Groups are Facebook features that assist organizations to promote themselves and disseminate their information. There are slight differences between these two options, but generally Pages are preferred for lodges.

A Facebook page is primarily a public relations tool. Any Facebook user can become a “fan” of the page and it is therefore open to brothers, friends, family, and community members. The advantages of a Facebook page are numerous. A lodge can post its upcoming events on the page and invite people to attend. This can allow your lodge to save money on postage and advertising, while reaching a wider audience of brothers and friends. Your lodge can post photos about the great events that it has had. The page’s fans can then get a more intimate look into your lodge and its happenings.

Large amounts of content can also be posted onto the lodge page. Trestleboards can be posted on the page via a web link. Videos of an installation of officers or even a Masonic family picnic can be uploaded. The Worshipful Master could even digitally record his Master’s message and upload it to the page. Links to your lodge’s website can be included, as well as a link to the Grand Lodge’s website and other pages about Freemasonry. Facebook pages can allow its fans to start interactive discussion topics, for brothers to discuss everything from refreshments to the lodge budget. The options for posting content about your lodge are countless.

Finally, one of the primary benefits of your lodge having a Facebook page is that it is completely free. As long as your brothers have an email address and an internet connection, they can use Facebook.

Facebook is not a replacement for real life, nor is it a replacement for Masonry. There is no such thing as virtual Masonry. The lodge and our face-to-face brotherhood are what makes Freemasonry special. However, Facebook can help keep brothers informed and help excite them about your lodge’s events. This, in turn, may inspire them to come out and enjoy the fellowship of the lodge.

Like email, websites, and online documents, Facebook is just another virtual working tool by which we can perfect our art. Hopefully, your lodge can find a way to use this new tool to help bring brothers, friends, and family a little closer together.