What happens if you do nothing? For years I have read and listened to leadership gurus explaining how one of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to lead change within their organization. Leaders must develop the ability to motivate their teams in order for change to happen. The status quo is the enemy; it is the last thing anybody should want. Maintaining the status quo means letting things stay how they are right now. The message that I’ve heard many times is that if we don’t choose to change things, things will never change.

And maybe I’ve drawn the wrong conclusion from all these leadership teachings, but I’ve ended up equating a maintenance of the status quo with being passive; if we choose to do nothing we’ll just end up staying right where we are. Healthy change takes a defined goal, a clarified direction, and commitment of resources. Growth and change requires work. Conversely, a lack of work means that things will remain exactly how they are. Or at least that’s how I’ve generally thought about things. I’m not the only one who has come to these conclusions, am I?

But 2020 brought revelation. Due to the dramatic disruption of the norms, I learned a new truth about the status quo; the norms that we seem to regress to when we aren’t working required a tremendous amount of power and resources to create. The status quo that most of us experience as the norm has actually been created. It is the result of powerful and influential people and organizations. There are systems and structures that have been deliberately created at great expense and effort. The world is not currently as it is always has been. We are experiencing the desired outcomes from decisions made by those who have the ability to shape the world.

Now if I’m starting to sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist, let me rephrase by simply saying that the world we experience today didn’t come into existence by accident. It was created this way. And the thing that 2020 revealed to me that was most surprising was that how much time and effort most of us put into protecting and maintaining the status quo. While we often experience frustration and disappointment with our place in the systems the shape our lives, we will actively defend those very same systems.

This is why change is so difficult. It’s not that we have to overcome indifference or laziness in order to make real change. Change actually has to work against systems that are reinforced by a tremendous amount of resources and powerful structures. But because the ideas and ideologies that shape the world also function as the lens through which we view the world, these forces often go unnoticed.

I know this may be begging for an example, so I will try to provide one without simply falling into the divisive debates that actually work to reinforce the status quo. America is wrestling with a crisis of healthcare. But we didn’t end up here by accident. Decisions have been made that shape our current situation. Years ago a system was developed connecting health insurance to employment. Healthcare costs have risen dramatically as the American population grows unhealthier overall and as expensive treatments are developed for medical conditions that weren’t treatable even a few years ago. Many employers are unwilling or unable to provide quality health insurance to their employees. Millions of people are suffering with their health and finances as the result of our current healthcare and insurance arrangement. Millions of people are struggling with their place in this system. Few people are happy with the current state of our healthcare system.

Yet as a nation we are unable to enact dramatic change. Why? Because even when the system isn’t working for us, we still have a tendency to defend it. The system that provides structure to our lives also teaches us our values. Obscene amounts of money and influence are being used to maintain that system and the status quo. It’s not passivity or apathy that is leading to a lack of change, it’s a system that empowers and enriches a few being reinforced by those same people who gain power and wealth in this system. Meanwhile, those of us who do not wield power and influence come to believe that our responsibility is to change our position in this system (get a better job with better benefits) rather than demand a wholesale change. “The system is not broken; I just need to do a better job of getting to where I am supposed to be in that system.”

Healthcare is only one example that has been at the forefront of debate over the past decade. There are many more just like it: education, employment and wages, childcare, politics, banking, industry, and the environment.

As the threat of Covid quickly spread throughout the country it disrupted these systems and structures that were in place. And as things that we would consider fundamental to our society started to breakdown some of the hidden forces that shape our lives were clearly revealed. In future blog posts I plan on exploring what Covid revealed about the role of the public education system and also the role of essential workers. So while I am not doing a deep-dive on those topics here, I think we’ve all witnessed how a change to one of those areas influenced so many other parts of our lives.

And thats the point I’m attempting to make; public school, for example, does not exist in isolation from other areas of society. A change in school meant a change in the work force. That change in the workforce means a disruption of the economy. Covid has revealed the direct link between schools and the acquisition of wealth. And not just in terms of equipping a future workforce, but in supporting the system of how wealth is generated today. And this is why outside of a global pandemic, any real change to the public school system is pretty unlikely.Tweaks and minor changes are possible, but dramatic changes are not desirable to those who benefit the most from the way things are currently.

The world has been arranged to function the way that it does. An area that I began to study this past year with the hopes of understanding better was the history of race in America. The video of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes while other officers stood by and watched was jarring for me. I realized that I did not understand a system where that was prescribed or even allowed. (Since then I’ve been even more confused as heavily armed men stormed the Michigan state capitol building a few months ago and then just this week men and women stormed the nation’s capitol, smashed their way in, occupied the building via force, and not a single one was restrained in a manner that lead to their death. But we’ll explore that in a different post)

With my confusion and discomfort regarding the situation that resulted in George Floyd’s death, I made the decision to try to learn and understand how the world that we experience today came to be. I first began by making the choice that I was going to believe People of Color when they shared their experiences (its amazing, to my shame, how transformative it was for me just to start with the assumption that they are telling the truth about what they experienced). The most helpful tool beyond that was a podcast on the history of whiteness in America. It was called Seeing White. It was the second season of a podcast called Scene on Radio. The first episode can be found here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scene-on-radio/id1036276968?i=1000381267487

I would encourage everyone to listen to it, but be warned, if you are a white person it will make you uncomfortable and offend you. It presents many hard truths, but it’s still the truth.

Much of my limited education on race was focused on the minorities and their situations. But this podcast turned the focus on how a variety of light skinned ethnicities that had their own deep rooted conflicts throughout the history of the world suddenly dropped their ethnic affiliations and joined together as white people.

I’ll admit that my love for history was challenged here by this honest look at how race and racism was literally created by systems of power. But I kept exploring because I knew that the way things are today are a direct result of powerful forces shaping our society into what it is today. We got here on purpose.

The first example provided by this podcast that helped me see the world-shaping forces at work was the story of Bacon’s rebellion. In 1676, one hundred years prior to the official birth of our nation, life was pretty difficult for the settlers. While the European migration to North America created a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity for the upper class, poverty and indentured servitude was the reality for many people. And Bacon’s rebellion is the story of impoverished European settlers joining up with impoverished Africans in Virginia in rebellion against Governor Berkley and the Jamestown Settlement. Jamestown was burned and the Governor chased from the settlement. While Nathaniel Bacon himself was actually a member of the upper class who was dissatisfied by his access to power in colonial Virginia, he saw that anger and despair of the poor African and European settlers united them against the same powers that he was upset with himself; namely the Governor.

And after witnessing the power and force of a united lower class, policies were enacted granting people of European origins certain rights. The logic was that the rage of European settlers could be quelled by allowing them to move a little bit closer to power while keeping the African people powerless. The white people wouldn’t rebel as long as their conditions were a bit better than the black people’s. The divisions between races was, in effect, created by the ruling elite in order to prevent the lower class from uniting together against their rulers. Society was deliberately shaped in order to ensure that powerful people wouldn’t have challenges to their power and to ensure that wealthy people had a labor force to keep generating their wealth.

Another eye-opening, yet difficult realization that came from this podcast was that, if being white meant certain privileges and access to power in colonial America, then someone had to define and regulate “whiteness.” If white people were going to be awarded land and rights, a definition of white had to be agreed upon in order to evaluate people’s claim to those benefits. This need to legally define whiteness began in the 1600’s but was still prominent as recently as the 1960’s and ripple on yet today. There are many court cases where people attempt to prove they were white in order to have access to rights afforded to white people. And of course there were people in those cases working to claim that certain people are actually not white.

At various points in American history a “one-drop rule” was implemented meaning that if you had any ancestors that weren’t light-skinned europeans (one drop of “non-white blood”), it disqualified you from the privileges and status of being white, regardless of what your skin color was. Whiteness as a construct that granted access to power and rights existed well beyond the end of the Civil War. It was maintained through segregation and Jim Crowe. It was maintained through voter suppression. It was maintained through redlining and other economic policies. It was maintained through lynching and the burning of black communities. It was maintained through law enforcement policies and prison systems.

My eyes have been opened to just how much power and resources go into maintaining the status quo. It took a war to end slavery. It took a decision from the US Supreme Court, followed by the President of the United States sending Federal troops in order for black children to go to the same schools as white children. If you look at how much power and effort was required to change the status quo, you start to get an idea about how much power and effort is going into protecting the status quo.

And so as I’m looking at our current experience in America I can’t help but see that the powerful forces that shape the world we live in have been at work for a long time. Powerful and wealthy people created a system that, at the same time, created wealth and power for themselves and ensured that poor and impoverished wouldn’t join together to challenge the system.

2020 was a year where I saw and learned a great many new things. But most importantly I learned (or at least was reminded) that 2020 did not come out of nowhere. The decisions and actions of yesterday create today. The experiences of our ancestors in history have shaped the experiences of our families today. We didn’t get here by accident and we won’t get away from here by accident. Those who have acquired power in the current arrangement of things use that same power to ensure things don’t change. They are winning the game and have no desire to see the rules change.

My hope for us in 2021 is that we learn to be more aware of the things that are shaping us and shaping our experiences; that we learn that we do not all share the same experience as Americans and thats not by accident. We might finally understand why we defend systems that actually bring harm to us and our families.

And once we start to grasp this reality, my hope is that we begin to view faith in Christ and citizenship in the Kingdom of God, not only as something I believe to be true, but as an alternate arrangement of power, wealth, and status that has been created by God and revealed to us in Jesus. King Jesus sits on the throne of this alternately-arranged kingdom teaching and exercising judgment to ensure that this Godly arrangement of the world continues to take root. And knowing that the Kingdom of God as described in the Bible looks drastically different than our world today, those of us who believe that God is control of history must be prepared to let go of the systems and powers of this world. The coming of God’s Kingdom means the going of the world’s kingdom. Some of these powers that work to main the status quo today are working directly against God’s will and God’s Kingdom. May we have eyes to see God’s Kingdom in our midst, and like the parable of the pearl of great cost, be willing to let go of everything else in order to receive it.

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:9-10

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