We need a new table where all are welcome

Key points:

• The systems we’ve inherited are suffocating our future, writes young adult leader Ben Smith.
• Built for another era, these systems function to protect power, are resistant to change and preserve a table that was not built with everyone in mind, he says.
• If we want a future, we cannot simply pull up more chairs. We need a new table; one by and for the very people the Spirit is calling to lead us forward.

 

Ben Smith.
Photo courtesy of the author.

After years working inside my annual conference and across our connection, I’ve seen up close how our structures dismiss the imagination of young adults, sideline the insights of lay people, and grow increasingly silent when confronted with honest truth.

If The United Methodist Church is going to have a future, it won’t come from doubling down on what’s familiar. Instead, it will come from a movement of people — especially those long pushed to the margins — not just pulling up chairs, but building a new table from scratch.

This conviction was reaffirmed earlier this month, when I stood before my annual conference and named some of these very truths.

In Holston’s first Young Adult Address, I spoke from a place of deep fatigue — weariness that comes from holding up structures that no longer serve the communities around us. I confessed how often we confuse institutional preservation with faithful mission.

I spoke of the weight young people inherit when we step into systems we had no hand in building but are now expected to save. And I shared the grief that comes with watching a church we love grow smaller, older and more risk-averse while the world cries out for courage, imagination and belonging.

The response in the room was undeniable: cheers, a standing ovation and dozens of conversations afterward with people — young and old, clergy and lay — who said, “Finally, someone said it.” For the first time in a long time, someone on the stage said what so many of us have been carrying in silence.

And yet silence (or worse, dismissive platitudes) is what I received from some of the very leaders I’ve served under and looked up to for years.

I’ve spent the past three years on my conference’s staff, trying to effect change from the inside. I have been in the rooms. I have served on the committees. I have offered ideas. I have asked questions. I have raised concerns. And, yet, again and again, I have seen the walls come up, boxing me out of a culture more invested in institutional order than holy imagination.

That silence speaks volumes. But so does the response of my annual conference. And it’s that response that convinced me: This must be a movement of the people.

This movement will not be led by bishops or carried out by committee. This movement will be rooted in the voices and bodies of those most often left out of the decision-making process — the young people, the lay people, the queer people, the people of color. The ones who’ve had to build community in the cracks of our broken table.

This isn’t just in Holston. Friends and colleagues across the connection report strikingly similar stories. I am willing to bet that you have felt it too if you’ve tried to lead from the margins. The gatekeeping. The silence. The deflection. The slow erosion of energy when your questions go unanswered and your contributions go unrecognized. The systems around us were not built to make space for the future. That’s why it’s time we start building something new.

In my address to Holston, I named more than what’s broken. I named the Spirit’s invitation to something new: a resurrection that holds our wounds without hiding them, a re-membering of the Body of Christ that centers the voices we’ve too often excluded, a church that journeys together not for the sake of survival but in pursuit of The Spirit’s calling.

We need more than rebranding and strategic plans. We need a reimagining of leadership itself. One that prioritizes the voices who haven’t always been in leadership — not as a demographic to reach but as leaders to empower. It means examining every system and tradition and asking: Who does this serve? Who does it silence? What might we need to release so others can finally have space?

I believe in the church. I’ve given my life to the church. But belief doesn’t mean blind loyalty. It means loving the church enough to let it change, loosening our grip on the way things have been, and believing that resurrection is possible — it just might look different than we expect.

Moving beyond prophetic words into courageous action is going to require you and me and others to faithfully join together to re-create, re-member and resurrect our conferences. So here’s what I’m asking: