Pagan groups can be whatever you want them to be. The angle of what we wish is broader than what will work, most of the time. And when you involve more people, you can expect the choir of requests to make changes or do various things within the group to get exponentially wider.
If you are starting or redefining a group, you’ll want to aim for what will work over what you project as optimal in your mind. It is so magical when precisely what you want and what is possible line up together.
Why do we join groups? It’s probably different for different people. Because of that, a group more often than not ends up being a network of diverse and varying intentions. There are several different agents in a group each with different expectations and differing agendas.
Groups need a common idea, practice, or methodology, let’s call it a vision and mission, to bring them together. Each agent in a group must work well together. And so your shared vision and mission is what attracts and appeals to those agents.
This document is your group’s identity and is what will not change while everything else about it will. After all, a group is an organism to its own. Organisms are systems of stable change. Creating this is why we start groups.
The anatomy of a vision is simple, it contains who you are, what you do, what makes you different or sets you apart from what other groups do (i.e. “Irish Polytheist”).
You also want to consider direction and timelines, if you’re going to obtain space to do what you do or continue to be nomadic.
Defining these things is important because even in groups that do this, there are disagreements that often happen between one interpretation of the vision and another. Some people ignore parts and later argue against them as if they weren’t the words under which they joined.
Then you want to sum that vision upon a mission which is a short sentence of what you do to realize that vision.
And its that simple. Beannachtaí na nDéithe daoibh!
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