This is one of the best articulations of why collaborative systems [re]design work—the better—collabyrinth facilitates is necessary. The following is an excerpt from chapter 8, “Ancestral Design,” of William Lamar’s Ancestors: Those Who Bless Us, Curse Us, and Hold Us (Broadleaf Books, 2026):
The ancestors who designed [Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC,] were making a grand and glorious statement. They knew that they were children of the Divine, and they created a space of welcome for all who shared their human lot. All! They designed a space of grandeur because they knew themselves to be grand and they desired that their progeny would live into their destiny. They desired a beautiful and sturdy space to sacralize human joy, mark human suffering, worship, pray, and learn. Our ancestors knew that freedom work would be unrelenting in this place.
Metropolitan is an affirmative theological and cultural statement. It does not lament exclusion in America’s mainstream (read: white institutions). It gets to the business of open doors. It does not exist in the shadow of anything American. It dances in the universal, human light. Metropolitan is the work of spirit-people from around this land. Its sublime stained-glass windows tell the story of collectivity in a culture of death-dealing individualism. People from Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee sent their money to build our national church in the late nineteenth century. Their largesse lives in color and light in our windows. Some who gave never saw Metropolitan, but they saw Metropolitan. They saw what they could construct as a force for creativity and community in the crucible of American imperial violence. Through many dangers, toils, and snares we yet stand.
How did these spirit-people, driven by Divine wind and stubborn sinew, build a place for all G-d’s children? How did they determine from the outset that the house of G-d would be open to and for all? There is not one recorded incident of anyone being turned away. There is no iconography lauding the forces of death in either window or on pew. This is truly a house of prayer for all people. The impulse of its founding is truly human and truly democratic.
Not far from Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church stands the Washington National Cathedral. This awe-inspiring structure is known to many because it hosts many events of national importance and lends a Christian veneer to the liturgies of American civil religion. It is the nation’s church for mourning and celebration. Presidents are funeralized there. Imperial wars have been sacralized there. Justice has been demanded there. Ensconced in the marvelous stained glass of the National Cathedral until recently was Confederate iconography and Lost Cause symbology. The Cathedral has taken these windows down in contrition and replaced them with images that would cause the death of those who installed the Confederate windows if they could see them.
The fact is that the Washington National Cathedral may be endeavoring to be a house of prayer for all people today,but that was not its founding impulse. Period. Full stop. It celebrated a mythology that enslaved benighted Africans and used poor whites as cannon fodder to keep rich, white slavocrats in power. The National Cathedral lifted that story. Metropolitan lifted the gospel story. The Confederate windows of the National Cathedral, a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953, were given to reassert white supremacy in a sacred space as Black people’s ongoing and unbroken struggle against American empire heated up in the middle of the twentieth century.
The founders of the National Cathedral knew what then founders of Metropolitan knew. They had read the same texts. They were aware of the movement of the same Spirit that animates us all. Why was one group more morally aware? Why was one group more spiritually aware? Why was one group more human? The god of those who have made peace with oppression and exploitation is not the G-d of those who welcome all. The excellent spirits of those who built institutions like Metropolitan are the ancestral energies that can lead us forward.
The founders of so many American institutions determined that they did not have to act humanly toward those who were not like them. This same deadly moral smallness infects politics, economics, and religion today. We must make no excuses for the rank inhumanity of America’s founders. We must make no excuses for those who continue in their path of exclusion and accumulation of wealth and power at all costs.
Metropolitan was designed to embody the world as it ought to be. The Washington National Cathedral was designed to sacralize America’s imperial status quo. Metropolitan has not had to replace any stained glass because we did not elevate to holy status any ideology that was not founded upon justice, beauty, and truth. Not one flag is in our windows. Not even Old Glory. We knew the true nature of the nation state. And we know that America has never been as good as its promise to all its people. Our ancestors designed differently and lived differently. Those who designed the National Cathedral failed to create a space for all people and they aided and abetted a nation that did the same.
And what about you and the institutions you hold dear in designing space and intention? Do you ask, how can we design so that those who come after us will not be saddled with the onerous work of repairing the injustices we have left to fester and consume human vitality? Those who design humanly are consumed by questions such as these: Who is not seated at the table of abundance? Why aren’t they there? How can we get them there? [Emphasis added.]
The Akan people of Ghana’s philosophy of Sankofa are indispensable in their wisdom of designing spaces of human thriving in communities. There is no way to remember our future without Sankofa sensibilities. For a marvelous future to emerge, the best of ancestral wisdom and energy must be present and palpable. Sankofa teaches us that there is no way forward that does not look to the past. And the past is not a philosophical construct. The past is the people who came before us. The past is the ancestors.
The United States of America is on a collision course with a violent end because it looks back to an ahistorical, bleached past that causes it to go forward without having learned from its sins. America is a bird that does not fly forward, but flies in circles. Problems many thought to be solved in America emerge—circle—again and again and again. Until we understand that even this fatigue-inducing reality is designed, we will keep going nowhere fast, together. Going in circles is our collective lot until redesign is prioritized. [Emphasis added.]
If this feels like too much. It should. This is we work, not me work. We must realize that our sociopolitical outcomes, as ugly and as oppressive as many of them are, are of human design. As they were designed, they can be undesigned and redesigned. Do not believe the preachers. Our world can be redesigned theologically. Do not believe the politicians. Our world can be redesigned politically. Do not believe the CEOs. Our world can be redesigned economically. It must be. Now is the time.