A message from your friendly neighborhood Advisory Knight...
It's been a crazy few weeks around here at the Temple and a lot has been going on. It has been said time and again that we need to do a better job of communicating just what is happening in Council, the Clergy, with the new Advisory Committee, and other areas of the Temple that not everyone gets to see, so here's a quick update.
In response to the resent return of some previously banned members and concerns about safety and security, the Council has been working with the Knights here to create a policy for reinstating previously banned members and creating a way fro them to rejoin the Temple community in a productive way. We've made progress in determining how to evaluate returning members, who has authority to let them back, and what conditions will apply to them upon return. We have also discussed when a permanent ban from the site is necessary and how that is decided. This is still being discussed, considered, and tweaked, but very soon we will have a concrete policy for dealing with these issues should they arise again.
Knights and Council have also been discussing the Knighting process here and how to involve more voices in that process. There are a lot of great ideas being presented including an appeals process should a candidate not be awarded the rank by Council for whatever reason. We are also clarifying the points system used to award the Associates Degree in Divinity that is required to become a Knight in order to prevent confusion. There are currently cases where we are testing some ideas to find what works best.
There have been some changes on the Council with some on hiatus and Wescli Wardest stepping down to focus on personal growth and study. He was instrumental in executing many member affairs, and that work is now being handled by Br. John with the help of others when possible. It is a lot of heavy lifting for just a few people, so we'll need some patience from members until we can get seats on Council filled.
Our Pastor Rosalyn J has been working hard with Clergy to update the bylaws and many procedures used by our Ministers. You may have noticed the "Contact Clergy" button in the nav bar and a few exciting promotions including Raxicorico being named our newest Assistant Pastor for the Seminary. We also have a number of Seminarians studying hard and making progress toward becoming Licensed Ministers of the Temple. More exciting news to come!
The Advisory Knights have some projects of our own as well, including a look into bringing an Apprentice into an advisory role to represent students studying to be Knights. This is just one of the ideas we're currently kicking around. We're still pretty new at this and we are mostly concentrating on finding our footing with our new role advising the Council and creating a solid job description that will guide our work going forward.
Ren has been working hard in the background as always to make the site better every day. He has found a way to bring back AjaxChat that was used on the previous version of our site. You'll find it in the Nav Bar up top, and it allows you to open chat in a separate browser window from the site. There will still be some tweaks that need to be made, but you can begin using it. We also had a bit of misadventure with some spam bots in the forum yesterday, but it was dealt with quickly by Ren, who I understand was woken up to handle it. Many thanks, Ren! And thanks to everyone who alerted Security Officers to the problem quickly.
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other current events going on, but there's a taste of the business going on in YOUR Temple. Please keep your ideas coming and reach out to Officers, Knights, and the Council if anything urgent arises that we can help with.
In Your Service,
~Senan
Topic Author
