When Do We Know It's Time To Move?
Contemplating our Masonic Temples
Driving around my little city today, I noticed that a For Sale sign has popped up in front of a little Church.
The Lodge in my city, Centralia Lodge, is blessed with a really excellent building. It is quite large, beautifully designed, and has significant rental income.
But, it is much too large for our needs. We can easily accommodate one hundred plus Masons for a meeting, but generally have fifteen or twenty attend. That makes things as simple as hearing a speaker across the room more difficult than it probably should be.
It also takes a tremendous amount of Lodge energy to try and maintain such a large building. Energy that gets diverted away from the Lodge itself. I know, because I’ve probably served about a dozen years on the Temple Board.
Lastly, even with the rental income, it is getting harder, over time, to keep our heads above water. Inflation is rising faster than rents can be increased.
There is no way that I want to get rid of our big, beautiful building.
But, if I take off my rose colored glasses, I have to ask myself, do we need to get rid of our big beautiful building?
Do we sell it for what would be a very significant amount of money, then add all of that to our investments so that they throw off more income each year? There’s not much doubt in my mind that our rate of return on that would exceed our current rental profits on a consistent basis.
If we were to buy a little Church building that was a better size and fit for our current needs, it is hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be better for the Lodge. But, we are emotionally attached to our current Temple. I know that I am, and I know that the other members of our Lodge are as well.
It’s a bit of rationality competing with emotionality I suppose.
I called a Realtor to get the details, and I’ll share them with the Temple Board and Lodge when I receive them, but I imagine we’ll stay in place.
Related to that, I suppose, not a large number, but certainly a significant number of Masons in this area have talked about not only selling our building, but selling the buildings of the other Lodges in the area, and then crafting a new, purpose built Temple for all area Lodges to share.
Certainly that seems logical as well. I’m told that when the Lodge in the East part of our County was founded it took the members of a Lodge in the middle part of the County (who were helping the founders get it started) two days to make the trip on horseback. Now that’s a forty minute drive, at worst.
There’s a reason that we built so many buildings in the past, and that reason ended with the creation of the Interstate Highway system. We don’t have to walk or ride a horse ten miles to get to Lodge anymore, we can just zip around in our modern buggies.
I’ve generally been against ideas like this, because too many Lodges have sold magnificent Temples to build a pole barn looking thing out in a suburb somewhere. Trading beauty for ticky-tacky.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way. I know that our Brothers in British Columbia and the Yukon built a truly magnificent new Temple in Vancouver, so it can certainly be done if there is a will.
I’m afraid that I don’t have any answers, only questions and disordered thoughts.
But, I do think we need to seriously ask ourselves, from time to time, if it is time to move, and what that move would look like.
MW, I recognize that many lodges are groping with questions like the one you posed, and I don't take lightly that preserving a long standing lodge building fosters pride among the Brothers. However, I believe that by the time the question of "should we keep it" is on the table that the lodge is already suffering from EDIFICE COMPLEX (see what I did there?)
Brother Nelson highlights the significant problem with aging buildings: " too much time, money, and effort go into maintaining our beautiful sacred space and that it takes away from our primary mission of pursuing masonic knowledge."
Masonry isn't a building, and if you're doing it right it's not even a place.
We, too, struggle with this conundrum. Our beloved lodge, built as a Second Degree Lodge, still has an active stereopticon whereby we project our lectures upon a screen that lowers in the East. The 100-year-old building just received a new boiler and underwent tuckpointing at a cost of 450K. Property taxes are our highest expense, followed by utility costs.
I believe that too much time, money, and effort go into maintaining our beautiful sacred space and that it takes away from our primary mission of pursuing masonic knowledge. We have dabbled with selling the building and downsizing our lodge, but I fear nostalgia and complacency will win the day.
What I do know is that our current model of maintaining the building with membership dues and rentals is unsustainable. If our lodge chooses to ignore this economic reality and make difficult decisions now, time will do it for us.