Why the Mile Long Table Matters

SPEAKER 02 : 0:02

I’m Rachel Maines with Crawford Media Group, and today I have Tim Jones, the founder of Longer Tables, with me. Welcome.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:11

Hey, Rachel. Good to be here.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:13

Well, it’s great to have you. You know, we have a table here, but it’s not quite a mile table.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:18

Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:21

You know, this thing that you’re doing is just so creative, very unique, and it really does change the communities in which you’ve done this. Explain to our listeners what Mile Long Table is.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:34

Yeah. So our organization is Longer Tables, and we’ve been setting tables for about 10 years, 10 or 11 years now. And we knew way before the pandemic that isolation, loneliness, this polarization that we’re feeling in our society was a real issue. And so, uh, I, I’d moved back from LA and a new friend met Carrie and she said, Hey, do you want to, uh, have dinner with people that you would never have dinner with? And I’m like, heck, heck yeah, let’s do it. And I show up and it’s an 80 foot table with people from all walks of life. And there were two rules. Number one, there’s no talk about work or job titles. Number two, we just want to experience the real you. And she mixed everyone up and we ate dinner. Without talking about work, she had questions at the table that were about stories from our childhood, our hopes for our families and our friends and our communities. And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And when you’re honest and you’re vulnerable and you’re telling stories from your childhood and other people are doing that and they’re listening, you discover that we are much more alike than we are different. We are all human and the table we believe is the most powerful place on the planet where people are rehumanized, you know, in this world that, that dehumanizes us. It puts us in our corners and our groups and our titles and our labels. The table says, no, you are, you are just human. And when, when we can connect on that level, it’s, it’s unbelievably powerful.

SPEAKER 02 : 2:16

Yeah, especially today where we don’t even know our neighbors. So all of us go to work, come back, don’t even talk to anybody around us, and we just do that over and over and over again. We need something like this to kind of get us, like you said, back into the community and back to having value, back into having conversations. Name again the things that you don’t talk about, titles.

SPEAKER 01 : 2:41

You know, we basically have three rules. There’s no talk about work, no job titles, because if you’ve noticed the typical lead when you meet someone is what do you do? Yeah, this doesn’t happen in any other places of the world. We love this question because we put so much of our value in our vocations. Right. And we need to understand we are not our work. Work can be an expression, a part of us, a vocation, a passion, but it is not who we are. And we tend to, when we either, you know, when we share our job, we tend to assign judgment and value to other people, depending what their vocation is or their, their job is, or more likely we’re likely to judge ourselves of like, I’m just a fill in the blank. And what that does is it creates separation and division between us. And so when we get rid of that, because it really doesn’t, it’s not a huge part of who we are, then it allows us just to connect as human beings.

SPEAKER 03 : 3:40

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 3:41

So it is unbelievably powerful. We love, I love announcing this rule at the beginning of a table and everyone panics for half a second. And they’re like, don’t worry, we’re going to give you something else to talk about. Yeah. Number two rule is we want to experience the real you. So when we show up at a party or we show up, especially at a big community event like this mile long table we’re doing, you know, we put on this persona. We have social anxiety and we kind of, you know, we’re the humorous. We tell jokes. We whatever. We’re Mr. You know, know it all. We just want to take the mask off and just be you. And wherever you are at, you are welcome to be just who you are. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to impress anyone. Just be you at the table. And the third rule is don’t sit next to people you know. You can do that every other night of the year. But for this table, we want you to sit next to people you would never sit next to. And that is one of the most powerful. powerful things. We have stories. We had a Latina grandma sit next to a Caucasian state Senator and I’ll never forget it. And could you imagine how that would have changed the conversation? If, if this Latina grandma would have known she was sitting with a state Senator, right? It would, if she would have, we would have got like 5% of her, right? But because it was just birth and birth of Chris, that was it. They had a wonderful conversation as just their full, true, real selves.

SPEAKER 02 : 5:19

Love that. Do you have icebreakers then? How does the conversation get going?

SPEAKER 01 : 5:24

Usually when you arrive at a table, you have a name tag. We will often use people’s names. We welcome them because most of the people are registered. And we will have them fill out a name tag with a prompt on it. Something as mundane as, where did you grow up? Which actually isn’t that mundane. We love our origin stories with superhero movies. That’s your origin story.

SPEAKER 03 : 5:48

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 5:48

And what does it say? Where did you grow up and what is that place? How is that place reflected in you? That’s a beautiful question. So we give people questions like that to just get them primed in and thinking about their stories that they can share. And most people do do really well with that.

SPEAKER 02 : 6:07

Love that. So bring us back to your organization, Longer Tables, and how you kind of got that going and some of the changes in the community that you’ve witnessed.

SPEAKER 01 : 6:20

Yeah. Once I experienced that first table about 11 years ago, I was in love. I was what I didn’t quite understand what was happening, but I’m like, I got to be a part of this thing. And so we started setting three or four tables in different parts of Denver. And then in 2017, I got a big idea. I’m like, we’re the mile high city. We got to set the mile long table. I mean, come on, as a storyteller that we just somebody’s got to do that. I wish it were somebody else, but it became us. And we got really close and it didn’t work that year. And then the pandemic happened. We can’t no tables for two years. We come back from the pandemic. We set a table with 80 human beings. Half of the people were masked. Half the people weren’t. And no one moved during that conversation for two hours. because we were starved of being seen, of being about three feet apart from somebody else listening to us, us being able to share, express ourselves, share our stories. And we knew in that moment it was time to double down. So we formed a nonprofit, we made a short film and we started setting more and more tables, which has led to not only the mile long table care nine years after we, we first dreamed about it, but, But setting tables inside companies because we realize, hey, this the silos that we see throughout our culture, throughout our society, it’s happening inside companies.

SPEAKER 03 : 7:46

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 7:46

In the same way. So we started taking tables into companies. And now we’ve been setting tables at conferences across the nation. We have other cities asking us to set tables in their communities because it’s just such a win win for a community. And now we’re organizationally going in into this direction of forming leaders who set tables. Could you imagine how our world would change if we just talk about our civic leaders? If these folks start showing up healthy and not leading out of fear or self-protection or self-promotion or ego or posing. their false selves being things that they’re not. Imagine how, how companies, cities, neighborhoods would change if, if people showed up in health and wholeness, not out of performing, but, um, out of their true selves. That’s what we want to, what we’re going to start doing. And we think that will have the most impact.

SPEAKER 02 : 8:49

Yeah. One of the rules, I think, number four, maybe you don’t have your phone at the table. I mean, that would be rude to do anyways, but you have a conversation about, you know, hey, put your devices away.

SPEAKER 01 : 9:00

We don’t. This is wild. But not once have we had to announce that because people don’t do it.

SPEAKER 02 : 9:08

Right. It’s just a given.

SPEAKER 01 : 9:10

I don’t know if it’s social pressure. I think it has to do with, OK, no one else is doing it. Everyone’s on their best behavior.

SPEAKER 03 : 9:15

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 9:16

So we haven’t no rules around that because people just don’t do it. And my other theory is when you’re sharing your story and people are listening, the last thing you’re interested in is scrolling Instagram.

SPEAKER 03 : 9:28

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 9:28

Because you’re being heard. And you’re getting to hold space across the table from someone else. And it’s absolutely beautiful. And we’re wired for that. So the other thing that that never has come up and that I’ve heard about or in my experience is politics. It doesn’t come up because, again, if we’re sharing our stories and the things that are meaningful to us and things that in a place that we feel seen or. Who wants to talk politics? Right. I don’t think anybody. So that that it’s a beautiful it’s kind of miraculous. It’s really beautiful to watch that.

SPEAKER 02 : 10:04

Yeah. Such a unique organization. Once again, I’m talking with Tim Jones with Longer Tables and they have an event coming up Saturday, July 26 at 10 a.m. called the Mile Long Table. So obviously the Mile Long Table, that’s huge. But what’s some other unique things about this particular event?

SPEAKER 01 : 10:25

Oh, my goodness. Mile-long table, if you give two feet per person, you seat 5,280 people at a literal mile-long table. That’s 668-foot tables. It is massive. How do you do this logistically? With a lot of great partners. We would not be doing this without a few partners. Southwest Airlines has been with us since last year and is an amazing company that’s very generous and believes in what we’re doing. And they try to do that in flying people around the country. We also are partnering with Serendipity Catering, which is a 23-year-old company, woman-owned here in Denver, Laura Zaspell. So very generous is basically donating the entire meal along with John Jaramillo of Hispanic Restaurant Association to two leaders in our in our city that have been doing this for years and more critically believe with all of their hearts that food brings down the barriers that all of us are experiencing in our world. So that and then Shamrock Foods needs a shout out because they are donating most of the food.

SPEAKER 02 : 11:38

You know what I was thinking when you mentioned Southwest Airlines? What if they did this on their planes? Okay, everybody. You know, three rules. We want you all to talk to each other.

SPEAKER 01 : 11:47

I would like to see a table down the middle of the fuselage. And you just, how amazing would that be?

SPEAKER 02 : 11:53

Yeah. This is so great. So, you know, how do you feel, you know, we’re a Christian radio station. How do you feel that this unique idea is fulfilling the call to share Jesus, you know, the call that he left us as a Christian?

SPEAKER 01 : 12:08

Oh, man. Do we have an hour?

SPEAKER 02 : 12:11

Only a couple of minutes.

SPEAKER 01 : 12:11

OK, a couple of minutes. OK, well, well, Jesus, we see Jesus engaging the world and people at the table more than anybody else. I spent a lot of time at the Last Supper. The Last Supper, it is the core reality. It is the core symbol. It is the core literal place that represents the kingdom of God and the advent and the reality of the kingdom of God from Old Testament all the way through the wedding feast. That is for all of our future. And we have the lamb. Jesus, in a mysterious, mystical way, if you want to go there, is the table. That gives us not only connects us in relationship to one another and to God, but connects us into the reality of having Jesus within us and the spirit within us. And I love saying that we went from the temple to the table. I mean, there is story. The last supper, as you mentioned, there’s story after story after story. One of my favorite scenes in the gospel is after Jesus has resurrected, he’s cooking fish on the beach and the disciples are like going back to their old life and they’re fishing and they’re frustrated. And he’s like, hey, guys, you want to, you know, he yells at him and says, hey, come have some breakfast.

SPEAKER 03 : 13:35

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:35

Like that’s Jesus. That’s our Lord that that is on the beach cooking fish for us.

SPEAKER 03 : 13:42

Right.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:43

This is not like some heavenly creator, whatever. This is Jesus on the beach cooking breakfast at a campfire. So. If that is how Jesus engages the world when he walked this planet, then, gosh, maybe that’s where we need to pull the curtain back on the reality of the kingdom. And instead of telling people about the table and the banquet feast and all of these things, it’s going to be great. It’s wholeness. It’s no tears. Why don’t we just invite them to experience it? So that is what we are doing with the table.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:20

Wow. Well said. That was pretty profound. Thank you so much. We’ll have you back, of course. Thank you. Listeners, go to milelongtable.org. That’s milelongtable.org to take part in this event. It’s going to be Saturday, July 26th at 10 a.m. You don’t want to miss this. And definitely connect with Tim Jones and let him know what a great idea this is. And just by taking part and inviting your neighbors and your family, your friends, will be a life changer. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER 01 : 14:49

Thank you, Rachel.