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Recently I sat down with my three year old granddaughter to play with Lego for the very first time – for her it’s true!

As we plunged into a huge pile of bricks and coins, I’m not sure who was the most excited. Lego deeply shaped my childhood. It ignited my creative imagination, developed my constructive abilities, and laid a playful foundation for my future life as both a mall developer and then pastor of building a new church.

Thanks to Lego, I learned to design, plan, train and celebrate everything I would ever build.

According to the Netflix documentary The Toys That Shaped Us, “the potential contained in this little box of magic is almost limitless.”

When I asked a high school math teacher how many different things I could build with just 25 standard eight point Lego blocks (five each red, blue, yellow, green, and white), he said, “It’s enough. to stack them one on top of another without any variation (sideways), the number of different turns is 623 trillion (and that removes all repetitions). It would be the smallest number possible! “

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So there I was, sitting at my dining table with my granddaughter. I didn’t know if she was old enough to be interested in Lego or if she had manual dexterity. But then she rummaged through the pile and pulled out a preformed slide. After building a structure, she took a Lego mini figure, climbed the steps, and let it slide. Then, full of joy, she shouted: “It worked!

When American architect David Greusel (lead designer of two Major League Baseball stadiums – for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Houston Astros) saw the Twitter post citing my granddaughter’s sighting, he commented: ” Its grip is excellent – I agree 100%! ”

As I read his words, it occurred to me that architects, engineers and designers must also experience this same visceral joy. They design a new stadium roof, exterior cladding system or building layout and it works!

To revel in what we create is a very human response and I think we are all made for this kind of experience – made in the image of a creator God who rejoices in all he has done.

My feeling is that long before the many great designers and builders built their signature projects, they built them in their childhood bedrooms.

Building things while playing is an original activity that fills the world.

In the history of Christian creation, God calls humanity to be “fruitful and to increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. (Genesis 1:28.) One significant way to follow this calling that fills the world is to create new things. God created the cosmos, then God called us to draw more of it – to build schools, businesses, economies, and nations.

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In a very real way, Lego helps us prepare for this task. And we can thank God for it – for the creative imagination of Lego founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, and for the timely technological development of plastic injection molding.

Over the past few weeks, I have received several submissions for a “Theology of Lego Challenge” that I created, as part of my research for a Lego sermon.

I asked participants to create something in Lego and then write a sentence describing how they felt during the creation process.

Toby’s four-year-old “Rescue Robo Rigger” is meant to help people when they get stuck. When his mother asked him how he felt doing it, he said, “I felt happy because I could build something that I had never built before… God can see me when I make Lego. He thinks it’s good, it’s really good and he likes to see it.

Toby is right. God takes pleasure in all the good things that each of us does. For us, feeling a pleasure to please through our creative processes is a very natural thing. I wrote to Toby (via his mother) and told him that God also knows what it is to build things that he has never built before (in the case of God – a universe!). Then I told him he was a bit like God when he wanted to help people who are stuck.

In a very real way, Lego has helped many of us discover what it means to be world builders.

The name Lego is derived from the Danish expression “leg godt”, which means “to play well”. Part of playing well as a human being is making the most of the world God has placed you in – physically, culturally and sociologically.

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We were made to lose ourselves for hours in the timeless process of creating beautiful and unique things. Whether we are building Lego play slides, Rescue Robo Riggers, or massive sports stadiums, we need to know that we are doing so much more than just playing or having fun – we are carrying on the sacred process of creating a world.

John VanSloten is the pastor of Marda Loop Church. You can watch his sermon on Lego Theology on the church’s YouTube page or on its website. www.mardaloopchurch.ca

Lego Fun Facts:

1. There are over 4 billion Lego minifigures inhabiting the earth!
2. According to CNN, Lego sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic.
3. The Lego colors were originally inspired by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.