Lebanon’s Travail

2020 GRAND LODGE LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE JOURNEY THE LENGTH OF THE LIGHT

By Alan L. Gordon, Deputy Grand Master

This year, the Grand Lodge Leadership Conference was held over three virtual sessions on August 18, August 25, and August 29th.

Initially, we thought the Conference would be a significant challenge this year due to social distancing requirements. After cancelling the Bolger Center, which had been our Conference home for many years, we turned to an outside production company to work behind the scenes and coordinate the complex vision of moving groups of attendees to various plenary and breakout groups.

It had never been the vision for this year to have a keynote speaker. Instead, we had always intended to hold more focused breakout sessions which would engage the brethren and provide them with productive ideas to help them to lead their respective lodges in the new

RWB Alan L. Gordon

reality of COVID-19. Drawing from our experiences at the annual Conference of Grand Masters of North America, topics were selected which were considered

to be not only important to our jurisdiction, but to Masonry throughout the continent.

The elected line of Grand Lodge officers were assigned topics based on their specific interests and talents. The topics consisted of the following:

1. Practicing Freemasonry in a Post

COVID World 2. Dealing with Difficult Masonic Issues 3. Budgeting for Lodge Activities During

Times of Crises 4. Developing a Strategic Plan for Your Lodge 5. Review of Grand Lodge Code and

Bylaws 6. Proper Selection of Candidates for

Your Lodge 7. Effective Communication 8. Education and Mentoring 9. Minding the Age Gap – Retaining

Older Member while Engaging Younger

Members 10.Building Consensus Within the Lodge

Many of these topics were assigned 45 minutes to present and were held in concurrent breakout sessions.

On the evening of the first session, there were 84 brethren in attendance. The discussion was lively as we presented some of the challenges and limitations to re-opening our lodges in the future. There were many great ideas posted in the chat room which are now being explored for the future.

We then allowed the brethren to choose the topic in which they were most interested in their breakout session. The advantage to this format is that if someone wants to move from one breakout group to another, they are free to do so. In observing the

WB Blatstein helps navigate the breakout sessions from behind the scenes

counts among the three breakout groups, it was fairly evenly split.

The following week, we picked up where we had left off. While we had slightly fewer participants, the presentations were great. RWB Chip Mahaney, our Grand Lecturer, fielded many questions during his presentation on Grand Lodge Code. There was a clear interest to learn what we can and cannot do under out Code. Again, the breakout sessions were evenly split among the participants.

For the final session, a Saturday morning was planned. Traditionally, the heart of the leadership conference is a time for the Grand Lodge pillar officers and the Senior Grand Deacons to meet with their presumptive counterparts for the next year, and the Grand Secretary meets with the lodge secretaries. In years past, the Grand Treasurer also met with Lodge Treasurers, a practice had for some reason been discontinued recently, but was reinstated this year. These sessions were allotted an hour, and many used their full time.

During the planning of this conference, it was identified that there are at least five charitable organizations operating under the auspices of Freemasonry in the District of Columbia. Normally, the attendees would only get a presentation from the Masonic and Eastern Star Home (MESH Charities, Inc.). This year, due

RWB Alan Gordon speaks to the brethren in his plenary session

WB MIchael Greenwald leads discussion during his breakout session

to the virtual format, all five were invited to make a 9 to 10-minute pre-recorded presentation on their respective charity. The general consensus was that they were very professionally done and provided much useful and new information for a great many brethren.

Overall, while we had the potential for more, we had close to 90 brethren, including our brethren in Lebanon in attendance. While we are still learning how to properly approach virtual sessions of this magnitude, much of the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. The Committee and the Grand Lodge officers did an outstanding job on research and presentation.

Hopefully, next year we can return to the Bolger Center, but failing that, we now have a viable alternative to help, aid, and assist our brethren to become leaders within in their respective lodges and within our Grand Jurisdiction.