My Time as Grand Commander of OSMTH, 2018-2025
I was elected for the first time at the Spring 2018 Grand Magistral Council of OSMTH, then again at the Spring 2019 meeting and finally for the third time in an online ballot in the Spring of 2022 (COVID rules!). Now that my terms of office are over, I retire to the pasture as the longest serving Grand Commander in modern times.
What is OSMTH all about? You can access much of the information on the public website of course, but in summary it is a worldwide, ecumenical Christian NGO of men and women of goodwill focused on good works, specifically protecting and encouraging those Christians at risk in the greater Middle East, and doing charitable works in their own country. Much of our focus is on education and supporting Christians globally. Taking inspiration from the original Knights Templar, when I was elected the decision making body, the Grand Magistral Council, consisted of representative national grand priories from: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, England & Wales, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, NATO, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Ukraine and USA. To these eighteen during my terms of office, Netherlands, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Romania, Ireland and Brazil were added, but sadly Denmark and Ukraine left our group. There were also successes at a smaller level, with Philippines, San Marino, Spain, Australasia, Peru, Uruguay and Chile all starting to grow. This gives the organisation so much strength, goodwill, knowledge and experience.
I was fortunate to have many great people supporting me in my role, some elected and some appointed by me. I was and am very thrilled that so many of my appointments have gone on to greater responsibility either at home, or taking on international roles or even very senior positions within the Order.
As the representative, and final line in the sand of the organisation, my role was managing all the competing national organisations and encouraging them on their charitable activities. Additional responsibility was to meet with religious leaders and I was especially honoured by His All-Holiness Bartholomew of the Ecumenical Orthodox Church in Istanbul where after some discussion and achieving common ground he presented me with a substantial medal.
One of the thrills of being Grand Commander was to take up the invitation from so many national grand priories to attend their events and whilst I could not attend all of them, I did manage to visit Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland and San Marino in addition to my visits to the six-monthly meetings in Serbia, Greece, USA, Finland, Bulgaria, Sweden, Romania and Argentina. It was a struggle to keep the momentum going during COVID times (2021-2022) but I instituted a series of online one hour meetings over several months just to keep in contact. This was in addition to my weekly Security meeting each Sunday, Communications monthly and the Magisterium (management board) each month.
Several Grand Priories granted me awards, for which I am sincerely grateful and eventually there will be images on this page of the bling!
So now I sit back and become one of the Old Wise Men, which is a great honour bestowed on me by my worthy successor from Finland with whom I have worked with since we sat next to one another as Grand Priors of Finland and of England and Wales (the latter now UK following the enosis with Scotland, and looked after at the head of the combined organisation by Anthony).
