In The LEGO Principle, Victory pastor Joey Bonifacio scatters LEGO-sized nuggets of revelation within a core message about connecting to God and to others. Along with revealing the fundamental principles on the power and simplicity of discipleship, Bonifacio offers a few “LEGO lessons.” Here’s a sampling from his book, which releases this month.
Not all LEGO pieces have the same ability to connect. Some have the capacity to connect with as many as 12 or more bricks, while others are limited. There are pieces that can connect to only one other brick. The secret of LEGO is not that every brick connects with the same number of other pieces, but that each piece has the capacity to connect.
The LEGO Principle that every piece has the capacity to connect was the revelation of a young Catholic monk back in the 1500s. He defined the doctrine of the “priesthood of every believer.” Martin Luther believed that those who have been “born again” in Christ have the innate ability to connect directly to God. That connection is what gives all believers the ability to connect others to God.
One of the greatest setbacks of modern-day Christianity is that we have relegated ourselves out of the role of making disciples and depend on a handful of “full-time” or vocational ministers to do the job. This is probably the single biggest reason our discipleship efforts are not working as they should. Common sense alone should tell us that a lone minister building relationships with hundreds or thousands of people is both impractical and impossible. Every Christian must connect to God and to others.
The first version of the LEGO brick was invented in 1949. Yet as great an invention as the brick was, it was of limited value. Four years later, in 1953, things started to change when the company invented the very first LEGO mat, which was then referred to as the “base for building.” Without the appropriate foundations LEGO bricks could not build anything worth building.
By 1955, armed with the mat, the company launched the very first “LEGO System of Play: the Town Plan Line.” From that point on LEGO bricks could build just about anything.
In a similar way discipleship relationships need strong foundations in order to build disciples for Christ. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “The life of discipleship can only be maintained so long as nothing is allowed to come between Christ and ourselves. Only by following Christ alone can he preserve a single eye. His eye rests wholly on the light that comes from Christ, and has no darkness or ambiguity in it.”
With Jesus as our foundation, there is no limit to the kind of families, churches and nations that can be built.
