Lego Connectivity

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was

Some of you know that besides for baseball and Star Wars I also love Disneyland, although perhaps I should throw in that I love my family as well. I follow several different people on YouTube to keep up with what’s happening at Disneyland, when I have time to watch. One of them has been a critic of Disney and its management, especially in their upkeep of the parks and the way they compare against Disneyland Tokyo, which is considered the cream of the crop. But their criticism is always done out of love; because they love Disney and everything it represents they want to call out those things that don’t match up to what they think the park can be, and in some ways, had been. But, under prior executive leadership they were directly called out for reporting a rumor they had ben told that Disney said was a lie, although it turned out not to be. But, because of the animosity that came about, this group was cut off from their press credentials in retaliation, which they took in stride, including not lessening their criticism and also enthusiastic praise when they thought it was deserved. But, now, under a new CEO, the communications department recently reached out to set up a meeting with them to first apologize for what happened, to reinstate their press credentials and also to start a conversation about some things they might work on together. I wish I would have known that last week because it could have worked great in thinking about the lessons that the Slinky Dog teaches us about leadership, and that just because people might be opposed to the direction, doesn’t mean they oppose the organization, they just don’t like the direction and that’s when listening to others can help make all of us better. But it also matches well with the direction we go today, which is the lessons we can learn about life and leadership from Lego®, and again credit is due to Michael Waddell and Ron Hunter, Jr. for the ideas of this series.

And so, let me start with the fact that the Lego organization treats Lego as the name whether we are talking about a singular or multiple Lego®. It’s like sheep or deer, whether you have one or multiple, they are the same, and the same with Lego®. Except, within the US, we have tendency to add an s to make it Legos, and so I am going to try and respect Lego® in their preference, but will probably invariably mess it up, so just keep that in mind. Lego® is now the largest toy company in the word, having passed Mattel® in 2015. And along with Play-Doh and the Etch-a-Sketch, which we’ve already discussed, it too was inducted into the inaugural year of the National Toy Hall of Fame, and was also named the toy of the century by Fortune Magazine, as well as the British Association of Toy Retailers, and it has an interesting history.

They date somewhat back to 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen opened a carpentry shop in Denmark making stepladders, ironing boards and wooden toys. He named all the toys he made Lego® based upon the Danish words Leg Godt which means “play well.” Unfortunately, his shop burned down in 1942, I’m guessing as a result of the war, although I couldn’t find any confirmation on that. But, instead of rebuilding and continuing to make toys out of wood, he instead installed plastic-injection-molding machines to make his toys, and in 1949 introduced what he called the Automatic Building Brick, based upon something he saw introduced by Kiddikraft in the UK. Christiansen saw what became Lego® as simply building upon the idea of wooden building blocks, with which he was familiar. This new toy was met with moderate success, but really took off when it was patented in the United States in 1961.  Since that first introduction, more than 600 billion Lego have been sold, with some 36,000 being molded every minute, and just to give some other perspective, the Rubik’s Cube is considered the best-selling toy of all time with 450 million units sold. And while Lego can bring a unique perspective to play, every parent can also attest that there is a uniquely special kind of pain that comes with stepping on a Lego® block in your bare feet. And thus, they are also multi-purpose: a toy and a medieval torture device.

But the one thing about Lego® is that they need more than one piece to be affective. One Lego® by itself is not very useful, and also not really fun to play with. What did Three Dog Night say about the number one? It’s the loneliest number, and then they also continued that two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one. And so, as we experience a loneliness crisis in America, and this is true not just amongst senior citizens because across all age groups, with 61% of people ages 18-25 saying they have experienced serious loneliness, which should be telling the church something, what Lego® tell us, what they show us about life and leadership is the need to connect. But not to connect peripherally, like two ships passing in the night, but to connect intentionally. To choose to do it. After all Jesus tells us, as his injunction to love, that we did not choose him but he chose us. He chose to be connected to us, and then calls us for to connect to others. So, we start with one block, no much fun, add another, and we’re getting better, but still not much, because with two standard Lego® blocks, of 2 rows with 8 pegs, there are 24 different ways to connect them together. If you add three, now there are 1,060 different iterations. Now Lego® used to say that there were 102,981,500 different ways to connect six standard blocks together, but mathematician Soren Eilers wondered about the calculation behind that and discovered that it only involved using all six at the same time, so he created a new program modeling using all six, and sometimes using less than six, and came up with the astounding number of 915,103,765 iterations. He then encourages others to try it, and a high school student Mikkel Abrahamsen wrote their own program, using a different software, and came up with the exact same number, and it turned out his method was actually better than Eilers. And if you keep adding blocks it becomes exponentially higher, and also harder to get as it took the programs a week to run the computation on six. So, relationship is better, and just because different groups have the same numbers doesn’t mean you get the same results, as they say about United Methodists, if you have six United Methodists together you are bound to have at least 8 different opinions. And that means we have to be open to those iterations.

One of Lego® ad campaigns was that Lego® is a different toy every single day. What you built yesterday doesn’t matter to what you can build today. That is every day is a new day, what happened yesterday doesn’t matter, and what comes tomorrow is yet to be decided. In lots of ways this is the idea of Wesleyan grace and our idea of Christian perfection, that every moment is a new opportunity to seek to live more like Christ, to put behind both our failures and our successes that they don’t define us, and instead to focus on this moment. And what this means for leaders is that these things are also not defining for us. Just because that’s the way we did it before, the way we built with the bricks before, doesn’t mean that’s what we have to do today, because today is a new opportunity, and yesterday perhaps we needed to build a plane, but today a house or a swing set is more appropriate, and we could also change up the colors, or the size. With Lego®, in their basic form, nothing is set in stone. Who here saw The Lego® Movie? Long story short, and 10-year-old spoiler alert, it turns out that the story is about a boy who wants to play with his dad’s Lego® sets, but his father wants to superglue them all together, which is called Kragle in the film, and it’s this battle between flexibility and creativity and play, versus structure and form and organization, of being locked into place. And let’s just be clear that there is a place for both, but way too often we default to the structure, and there are definitely people who want to super glue things into place. That’s the tried and true, the way we’ve always done things. And without some structure everything would be chaotic, and even Lego® have structure, right? The locking is top and bottom, not on the side. But when it’s all about structure, rather than having 915 million options you only have a few or maybe even one, which is hugely limiting.

This past week I was at the conference office for several meetings and one of them was to talk about the future of the New Mexico conference and who we want to be, and what we want the future to be for us and our boundaries and our connections. For the most part, those things are sort of locked into place, with little ability to change, but with everything going on in the church at the moment, there is a lot more play. Some of the Kragle has been broken away allowing us to think in new ways and to look for new ways of doing things and new ways of connecting. Now, I will be honest I have been arguing for some of the things that we are considering for a while, while also being told they would never happen because things were stuck. And we also have to recognize other realities that we aren’t going to be able to connect with Minnesota or Oregon, because those don’t make sense, there are limits to what can happen, and Lego® knows that too. You can’t really build a curve with the standard Lego® set. And sometimes the set itself limits what can be done, and if you come into my office you’ll see lots of Lego® Star Wars, and they are set, and when Lizzie wants to play with them there are times I would prefer that they were Krageled together so she can’t take them apart. A time and a season for everything.

Which leads to my last point for leadership and that is what happens if you just throw a bunch of Lego® on the floor? Will they come together to do anything? Will they magically form a great structure? No, of course not. There is the potential for something, there is the potential for connection, but without intentionality nothing will happen. Without someone bringing them together and beginning to connect them, nothing will happen. That’s where leadership comes into place, and you don’t even necessarily have to have a plan, although having a plan is certainly better. But I know that many of us had the experience of just starting out with the Lego® and start putting them together and coming up with something, some creation, that never would have been expected, and there is a definite place for that in leadership, of brainstorming and seeing what all is possible before settling on something. But Lego® also show us that at some point you have to choose a direction, a shape, a form, and when you choose that you then eliminate other things. It doesn’t mean they are eliminated forever, because tomorrow is a new day, with new realities and new ways of doing things and if we get locked into that old structure it is liable to collapse on us because it’s no longer realistic or effective. And so Lego® show us that we can change and start again.

And what makes Lego® work is the simple structure and the connection, and that is true for us as well. Jesus says to abide in his love, just as he, and his love abide in us. One block connecting to another, and then to build upon that, we are to love one another. And I will note that it doesn’t say like each other, but to love one another, which is not a feeling but a way of being. Again, the definition I like comes from Augustine who says that it is to will the good for another. To connect with them to build something, more, something better than ourselves, to build the beloved community. A Lego® by itself, doesn’t do anything, isn’t a part of anything, it can’t bear fruit. But together, by binding together, and connecting together, and growing together and living together, by being a part of the vine, then not only can we bear fruit, but we can bear abundant fruit. And honestly this should be something that the church should excel at. There are lots of things that are wrong with the church, and ways we should be called out, but community should not be one of them. As Carey Nieuwohf has said, “nobody should be able to out-community the church.” And why? Because we are called to love; not those we like, not those who are like us, not those who we want to be around, but all. And the truth is in the ways that we fall short of this, is the ways we fall short of the glory of God. If we loved like Jesus, if we loved as Jesus calls us to love, if we built connection like Lego®, people would be lining up outside our doors to be involved, although to be that connection we shouldn’t be waiting for them to come to us, we should be going to them to make those connections, to build those relationships, to love on the world so that we can in turn build the beloved community, to build the Kingdom of God.

A Lego® finds its value in its relationship to other Lego®, and the same is true for us. We are called to be in relationship with others; we are called to be connected to others; we are called to love others. And when we come together, when we are given that vision of who we could be, or when we play around to create a new vision, then we are working together to be something more than ourselves and more than what we can be by ourselves. While there are times in which we might want to lock a Lego® structure into place, we also need to remember the need sometimes to recreate, of the possibility of changing, of creating something new every day. And that last piece comes not just from building with Lego®, but from the Lego® creator himself. After his warehouse burned down, Chriastensen could have rebuilt and gone back to being a carpenter and building toys out of wood. But instead, he changed, and he changed radically, and because of that change, he changed the world. He taught us a new way to play well, to make connections, and perhaps to love well. Jesus says, abide in me as I abide in you, be connected to me as I am connected to you, like a Lego®, and in turn love others, be connected to them in order to build something new, something better, something more than ourselves, to build and to be the beloved community by following God’s commandment that we love one another, and by this we will be known as his disciples. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.