It’s committees, and not superheroes, that change the world

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LOUISVILLE — Author, activist, speaker and songwriter/musician David LaMotte, who’s spoken and performed at many PC(USA) gatherings over the years, has a unique take on how true change occurs in the world.

It’s generally not because some superhero swoops in at the last minute to save the day. Rather, it’s through the often tedious but productive and faithful work of committees.

LaMotte, of Black Mountain, North Carolina, saw his recent TEDx Talk, “ ">Why Heroes Don’t Change the World,” released on Tuesday, and so did many others. In the 20 hours following its release, about 23,000 people viewed his 18-minute talk, and the numbers continued to grow Wednesday morning. LaMotte used some of the material he related during an APCE workshop in 2020 and in other venues.  Among LaMotte’s books is “You Are Changing the World Whether You Like it or Not,” published last year. The study guide that accompanies the book can be ordered here.

“This was really challenging for me. I spend time on stage for a living, and I’m generally very comfortable there, but this is an 18-minute talk with virtually no ad-lib, no notes, a very tight time limit and one chance to get it right,” LaMotte told Presbyterian News Service Wednesday about his TEDx Talk experience. “I worked on it for months, with feedback sessions and rehearsals and re-writes and lots of support from the TEDx Asheville team and my friends and family.”

“The really beautiful part … is hearing from folks who are saying that they are encouraged by it, or that they needed this particular word in this particular moment,” LaMotte told PNS. “Shifting lenses (or hermeneutics, for the seminary crowd) in the way that I discuss in the talk, has really changed the way I see the world, and also theology, and church, for that matter.”

“I trust that Spirit moves in spite of me, and it seems like good things are happening through this,” LaMotte added. “I’m feeling deeply grateful this morning.”

In his TEDx Talk delivered in Asheville, North Carolina, LaMotte first dispenses with the hero narrative, despite the number of Hollywood films that depict it. “Fortunately, there’s another narrative. It’s a lot less popular, but it has the added benefit of being true,” he said. “It’s called the movement narrative, and it says, if you want to address a large-scale problem effectively, what you need is a lot of people moving in the same direction and doing a little bit each.”

In his talk, LaMotte distinguishes between the story he learned as a child of Rosa Parks’ arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for not yielding her bus seat to a white person, and the more complete version of the story he’s learned since.

“Here’s what nobody told me in elementary school,” LaMotte said. On the day of her arrest, Parks had already been a civil rights activist for more than 20 years, including a dozen years as secretary of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama. No one had mentioned to young LaMotte the existence of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of more than 200 African American women organized into three chapters around Montgomery. A year before Parks’ arrest, the WPC had written to the bus service provider, informing the company of WPC’s concerns with the company’s practices and explaining they planned a boycott if changes weren’t made.

No one told young LaMotte about Jo Ann Robinson, the WPC president who quickly called for a bus boycott that began the Monday following Parks’ arrest. With help from two of her students, Robinson overnight arranged for 17,500 flyers to be mimeographed and distributed announcing the boycott, which had in fact been in the works for months.

Once the boycott began, Parks was one of those who dispatched rides for anyone who couldn’t walk to where they needed to go in Montgomery. “She went right back to the movement work because she understood that the movement work is what moves things forward,” LaMotte said during his talk. “That’s why we call it movement work.”

Movement work includes at least six steps, LaMotte explained:

• Figure out what you’re going to work on, since “you can’t work on everything.”
• Find your people. “Most movement people are going to be really happy to see you at the door.”
• Do an asset inventory of your group. “Think about what you have to work with — what skills, what knowledge, what social connections.”
• Make an achievable short-term goal.
• Do that thing. “Give yourself a deadline and make it happen.”
• Follow the instructions on the shampoo bottle to “rinse and repeat.” “Figure out what went right and what went wrong and how we’re going to course correct, and then go back to the top and start over.”

“So, friends, I’ve got bad news and I’ve got good news. I’m going to do the bad news first, and it’s really bad news, so brace yourself,” LaMotte said during his talk. “You know what changes the world? Committees change the world,” he said, eliciting laughter from his audience. “It’s true. People getting together to figure out what needs to be worked on, who’s going to do what, when we’re going to meet again to make sure we did it. That really is how the world changes.”

“It sounds kind of naïve, but it’s not naïve. Here’s the thing, friends. We use the phrases ‘change the world’ and ‘fix the world’ and ‘save the world’ like they mean the same thing, and they do not.

“If you think you can fix the world, guilty as charged. That’s naïve. If you think you can save the world, you might be shooting a little high. But if you think you can change the world, you’re just paying attention. The truth is, it’s not naïve to think you can change the world. It’s naïve to think you can possibly be in the world and not change it. Everything you do changes the world, whether you like it or not. We need you. So, what changes will you make?”

The audience responded to LaMotte’s talk with a standing ovation.

Here’s how LaMotte concluded his comments to PNS: “And, of course, it makes me chuckle that the best laugh I got in the talk was on the line about how committees change the world. That’s the most Presbyterian thing ever!”