The Leader

For Some Lodges, a Change of Pace

In February 2022, the members of Oakland’s Templum Rosae Lodge No. 863 will hold their regular stated meeting. Then, they won’t do it again until May.

The new schedule is made possible by a new piece of legislation passed in early October at the 172nd Annual Communication that permits lodges to meet quarterly, rather than the traditional monthly cadence. (Historically, some snowed-in lodges have met 10 times per year.) “This frees lodges from having monthly stated meetings for the sake of having monthly stated meetings,” says Mike Ramos, past master of the lodge and now the secretary for fraternal affairs with Grand Lodge. “Meeting only four times each year will allow for more meaningful meetings.”

The result, Ramos explains, isn’t less Masonry—in fact quite the opposite. By meeting every three months, Templum Rosae aims to turn otherwise drab business meetings into events its membership looks forward to. Particularly at Templum Rosae, where the majority of members are in their late 30s and 40s and many have families and children at home, a quarterly meeting schedule better fit its members’ lives. “We don’t even own a lodge building,” Ramos says, “and the bills we do have to pay are minimal, so a meeting monthly was really pointless.” Ramos points out that the four-times-per-year meeting schedule isn’t unique to California, either: The United Grand Lodge of England, the “mother lodge” to regular Freemasonry, does the same.

The idea behind this legislation was to give lodges the ability to better respond to their members’ preferences. Says Jordan Yelinek, the assistant grand secretary and Grand Lodge director of member services and lodge development, “We firmly believe that lodges know their needs best. For some, meeting each month is not best.”

However, Yelinek stresses that lodges that want to continue meeting monthly can and will do so. In fact, the expectation is that most lodges will still meet as they always have.

For Templum Rosae, the quarterly meeting schedule still represents a packed calendar: During the four months in which the lodge meets, they plan to cram a lot of Masonry in. That means hosting “lodges of instruction”—basically ritual practice—weekly during that month, in anticipation of the initiation, passing, or raising of a candidate at the end of the month. That’s on top of its usual complement of prospects’ nights, dinners, and outings. So while business meetings will still happen, it's clear it won't be business as usual.