Spring Fellowship

Brothers,

As March approaches, our Ordeal Season is about to begin, starting with Spring Fellowship. Spring Fellowship is taking place on March 18th-20th and is arguably the most important event our lodge hosts. It is one of our two Ordeal Weekends, and out of the two, has the most attendance.

At Spring Fellowship there’s an abundance of things to do from service work to patch trading there’s something for everyone.

However arguably the most important job at Spring Fellowship is that of the Elangomat. In Lenni Lenape Elangomat means Friend, as an Elangomat you serve as the ordeal candidate’s friend. Your job is to guide them through the weekend, support them and serve with them. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s one of the most satisfying jobs to do and I highly recommend everybody do it at least once.

If you’re interested in becoming an Elangomat, please register as soon as possible for the last training session before Spring Fellowship: March 12th at Camp Rainey Mountain. You can sign up at: Mowogo Event Registration

Elangomatting isn’t the only thing you can do at Spring Fellowship! The second most important thing you can do is to be a Ceremonialist. As I’m sure you remember from your own Ordeal, Ceremonialists play a huge part in the Ordeal Experience delivering all the impactful information about our order. If you’re interested in becoming a Ceremonialist, contact your Chapter Chief and the Lodge Vice Chief of Indian Affairs. You can email the VCIA for further info at: lodge.vcia@mowogo.org

Another highly important role at either of our ordeal weekends is that of the Indian Engineer. Indian Engineers are like the stage crew, working in the background to make sure everything is set up and running smoothly for the candidates. Their work includes setting up and preparing the ceremony rings and making sure the torches are ready and lit. If you’re interested in serving as one, you can contact the Lodge Vice Chief of Indian Affairs at: lodge.vcia@mowogo.org

Last but not least you can help out with check-in and the trading post by serving for Administration and Finance! Working Check-In will help the event run smoothly and efficiently as we always need more people to help out! You could also serve in the trading post and sell OA Merch throughout the event. If either of these jobs sound interesting reach out to your lodge Vice Chief of Administration at: lodge.vca@mowogo.org and your Vice Chief of Finance at: lodge.vcf@mowogo.org

If one of these specialized jobs just isn’t for you, attending is still a great help to our lodge. While these ordeal weekends provide new membership to the lodge, they’re a time for existing members to give back to our host camp. CRM is nice enough to sponsor lodge events, and in turn we use our two ordeal weekends to repair and prepare the camp for the summer. If you sign up to attend, you’ll spend Saturday in service to the camp, giving back to CRM and making it a great camp for those who’ll use it in the future.

But Spring Fellowship isn’t all work! During Saturday lunch there will be a silent auction for all to participate in. In the evening a campfire will be held with fun skits, songs and activities from every chapter. Following all this will be a cracker barrel with dessert, snacks and time to spend with friends. Ending off the night will be a patch auction which will certainly hold rare patches!

Spring Fellowship is on March 18th-20th, you can sign up for this great weekend of fellowship and service at: Spring Fellowship Registration

A final note about our quarterly newsletter, the Arrow Points. As I'm sure you know we have a newsletter released prior to each of our four main events. This typically contains an article from each of the LEC members. But you might not have known that every member of our lodge is allowed to submit content. That’s right, you can send me something to include in the newsletter, whether it be a story about an OA experience, some photos from a past event, or how the Order has affected your life. It’s all welcome, just send it to lodge.vcc@mowogo.org and I’d love to add it!

I hope to see you at Spring Fellowship!

Yours in Service,
Will Benjamin
Lodge Vice Chief of Communication