Lego churches

 If you've had small children in the home you've probably had Legos. Kids and many adults love them because of the ability to build some very creative things. They are not so much fun at 2:00 in the morning when you step on one barefooted in the dark!

Most Legos have about six snap-on points. Some have more while others have less. As you connect the Legos with these snap-on points you can build just about anything you can creatively imagine. Once all the connecting points are filled you cannot connect anything else to that piece.

Think about this in relationship to the church. The key to getting new people to connect to your church is to offer them connecting points with other people in the church. Unless a new person makes a connection with others in the church in a relatively short period of time they will find the back door and you'll not see them again. The problem is that in many churches, especially smaller churches, most people have all the relationships they can maintain. It's not that they don't like the new people or that they don't want to relate to them, it's that their connecting points are all used up. So what can the church do?

The key is to offer more connecting points. This may be from starting a new Sunday school class. One church had a Young Adult class that had grown too large to allow new people to feel like they fit in. The church started a new class for that age group, and when guests came to the church in that age group they were directed to the new class. Within a few months the new class had grown substantially.

The same thing can be done with small groups. A healthy church should be regularly exploring the possibility to starting a new small group to enable new people to build connections with people in the church. This means the church must constantly be developing leaders for these groups and identifying topics that would appeal to the people in the community for these new groups.

Healthy churches will be very intentional about taking steps to create as many connecting points in the church as possible. With enough Legos you can build anything you want. With enough connecting points in the church it can grow much larger than it is.