A New Years Resolution For Your Lodge: The First In A Series

by Midnight Freemason Contributor

WB Gregory J. Knott

Here comes 2014 and is a natural time to think about New Year’s resolutions. While that resolution of losing weight and exercising more will probably done by MLK’s birthday, there is no reason not to carry through with ideas of improving your lodge through the coming year.

My lodge - St. Joseph Lodge No. 970 has risen from the ashes in the last 5 years. We were at a point that the doors were literally ready to close. We couldn’t even make a quorum for most of the meetings. But we decided we didn’t want to end Masonry in our town and made the decision to give it a try to keep the lights on and grow.

Our efforts paid off handsomely has our membership has grown, we won the Grand Masters Award of Excellence in Illinois twice and in 2011 named one of the winners of the prestigious Mark Twain award.

I’ve been as many times what did we do to turn things around, so in a series upcoming articles I am going to share some of the things that we did. Most of these ideas weren’t novel, we were very willing to take something another lodge or groups have done and use it as our own idea.

So since you’re reading this blog, I assume you have a strong interest in Freemasonry. So the first idea I want to share is desire. We had a strong desire to keep our lodge open and to get it going again in the right direction.

Some of the best discussions we had were late nights in the kitchen after the lodge meeting was over. These were true brainstorming sessions that weren’t necessarily designed that way, but they helped build the enthusiasm and are what really set us on the course for improvement.

So if you have the desire to improve your lodge, my next few articles will lay out what we did to keep the doors open. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, just my experience of what worked for us. Until next time, work on that desire to improve your lodge.

~GJK

WB Gregory J. Knott is the Past Master of St. Joseph Lodge No. 970 in St. Joseph (IL) and a plural member of Ogden Lodge No. 754 (IL), and Homer Lodge No. 199 (IL). He's a member of both the Scottish Rite, and the York Rite, and is the Charter Secretary of the Illini High Twelve Club in Champaign-Urbana. He's also a member of the Ansar Shrine (IL) and the Eastern Illinois Council No. 356 Allied Masonic Degrees. He holds membership also in The Masonic Society, The Scottish Rite Research Society and the Philalethes Society. Greg is very involved in Boy Scouts--an Eagle Scout himself, he serves the Grand Lodge of Illinois A. F. & A. M. as their representative to the National Association of Masonic Scouters.