THE NEXT BROTHER: What Freemasonry Lost, and What We Found We Still Had.
For nearly thirty years, Brian D. Neely has watched Freemasonry change through a series of reasonable decisions made by good men trying to solve real problems. Each decision seemed small. Together, they changed how the Craft welcomes, teaches, forms, and remembers its Brothers.
The Next Brother is an honest examination of what has been lost, what remains, and what must still be passed on.
Through stories drawn from a lifetime in the Craft, Neely reflects on candidates and coaches traveling the road together, Lodges discovering what it truly takes to enter, pass, and raise one man, ritual knowledge lost because no one thought to learn it, and Brothers who proved that fraternity does not end when the meeting closes.
At the heart of the book is a question Freemasonry can no longer afford to avoid:
Is knowing about the Craft the same as being formed by it?
Written for Master Masons, in the plain language of one Brother speaking to another over a cup of coffee, The Next Brother argues that empty seats are not the sickness. They are the symptom.
The deeper question is whether the men who still carry the work will place it in the next man's keeping before it is carried to the grave.
The meeting may end. The fraternity does not.
Pull up a chair, Brother. One has been kept for you.
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