We’re Moving!

After several months of no activity here, I’ve decided to move LL&L and integrate it as a category over at my main blog site: http://robedwardslive.com

If you’ve been dropping by here wondering what’s up, I hope you’ll join us over on the new site.  After a month or so, I’ll take this site down so everything will be over there.
See ya later!

Lego Purists

When Joshua was little, his Aunt & Uncle bought him a big blue tub of Legos. There were all kinds of cool things in it, and he thoroughly enjoyed making all kinds of wonderful things.

One evening we were walking through a local toy store and found the Lego section. There we discovered all the great innovations in Legos beyond the usual assorted blocks. There were kits you could buy which had exactly enough of the precise blocks you needed to build whatever was on the kit. Pretty cool. So we bought Josh a few for his upcoming birthday.

It worked pretty well for a day or so. We built the kits and he had fun with them. Then he decided to disassemble them. Now all the neatly sorted and assembled parts got mixed in with all the other bazillion Legos he had.

Why my Lego wall is stronger than Rob Bell’s brick wall

By now most folks are familiar with the name Rob Bell and his book Velvet Elvis.  In his book, Bell begins to discuss various theological beliefs and whether they are essential to the Christian faith. The analogy that he uses is of the theological tenets being bricks in a wall.

This is NOT what I mean by a Lego church

Before everybody inundates me with the photos of the church built from Legos that are all over the web, I wanted to go ahead and link over to it to demonstrate what I am NOT talking about.

Replication is not Innovation

Ben Arment is chewing around the edges of the issue of innovative churches.  Earlier this week I was talking with one of the church planters in our Association, and he was talking about planting a “simple church,” and we talked about that paradigm of planting.

Reflecting on these two events, and recalling the host of books I’ve seen which talked about how to build/grow a church, I’ve come to a simple conclusion.

Of Lincoln Logs & Legos (or what this blog is all about)

One of the childhood toys I best remember is playing with a set of Lincoln Logs that I got for Christmas one year. I remember spending many hours building lots of different things–stores, schools, houses–but the funny thing was that no matter what I may have called it, it was always the same thing–a log house.

As I grew older and would visit in my friends’ homes, I discovered they had a new toy called a “Lego.” These simple building blocks came in different colors and sizes and shapes, and there seemed to be no limit to what we could make with them. What one minute was a skyscraper the next was a space ship was a car was a castle was a battleship, etc.

In fact, so versatile is the basic 8-lug Lego block that a simple column of only six (6) 8-lug Lego bricks can be combined in a total of 915,103,765 combinations (Lego Company Profile, p. 18). And there are enough Legos in production for every one of the six-billion-plus people on earth to have 62 bricks each.

Now what if we applied Lincoln Logs & Legos as a metaphor for the church?