Brick by brick: What Lego’s unexpected comeback can teach a declining church

In the early 2000s, the Christian writer Nick Page penned a fictional series of articles for this magazine under the title ‘Church Invisible’. They were designed to give the body of Christ a kind of worst-case scenario for its own future. The articles are still available to read in the premierchristianity.com archive, so I won’t spoil them, but here’s the central idea: in 2040, the British Church has all but disappeared. 

Through a fictionalised version of himself hurled forward 35 years by a “timey wimey” lightning strike, Page drew dotted lines from the trends and warning signs of a Church that was beginning to wrestle with sharp decline and imagined its total unravelling. More ambitiously than that, he tried to imagine why that might have happened. Among the reasons: a loss of connection with tradition and reverence; unwillingness to reform and change; and increasing detachment from the local community. 

More recently, as the pews and chairs of many churches have noticeably emptied, research has suggested that Page wasn’t simply scaremongering. Mathematician Dr John Hayward analysed the R-number (remember that from the Covid pandemic?) of various denominations, and found that most were reproducing below the level at which growth is possible. An R-number below 1, as demonstrated by the CofE (0.9), Methodist (0.6) and Baptist (0.7) churches among others, equals a slow decline into eventual extinction. By the 2080s, Hayward posited, most churches as we know them now really will have become invisible. 

Christian faith, just like Lego, is easy enough for a child to grasp and deep enough to be enjoyed for a lifetime

Around the time that Page was contemplating the impending demise of a grand institution, a similar existential crisis was taking place in a very different context. In Denmark, the executives at Lego, which in the 1970s and 80s had risen to become one of the world’s leading toy brands, were staring in terror at sales figures and balance sheets. Had one of their number been a witty columnist with a penchant for futurising, he might have penned a series of articles for the Lego Club newsletter called ‘Bricks Invisible’. As the millennium turned, there was a genuine risk that Lego would go completely out of business. 

Of course, a glance around any modern toy store will confirm that those fears proved unfounded. Lego not only made the greatest comeback since Elvis, but rose to more world-dominating heights than ever before. So how did Lego arrest and reverse its decline, and could that story – and the enduring popularity of a simple brick building toy – have something to teach the Church as it seeks to swerve its own predicted journey towards obscurity?

Fantastic plastic

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp is hardly a household name outside of Denmark, but the former Lego Group CEO has been called “a better model for innovation than Steve Jobs” (those words come from Brick by Brick, David Robertson’s book about Lego innovation). When Vig Knudstorp took over as chief executive in 2004, the toy company had dramatically overreached, with tanking sales and a debt estimated at $800m and rising. Management consultants had urged them to follow the lead of other toy companies and diversify, so they had rapidly broadened from their core business to launch theme parks, clothing and a line of video games. They were haemorrhaging money, and it had happened partly because Lego had lost sight of its own USP.

The turnaround that Vig Knudstorp led is now a case study on every business course in the world. Yet to look at Lego’s diverse and ubiquitous output today, it would be easy to misunderstand what happened. Yes, Lego is everywhere, and yes, that’s the very reason for its enormous profit margins. Yet, counterintuitively, it’s precisely that widespread proliferation that nearly killed it. 

What Vig Knudstorp actually did when he took over the reins at just 36, was to rebuild the company, brick by brick. He was driven by a simple idea: that Lego had lost sight of what made it great: a joy-bringing series of interlocking plastic bricks that enabled play and creativity. Rather than expanding into new areas, he started by dramatically reducing production costs, halving the number of individual brick types that were manufactured, and prioritising the design of fun playsets with lots of replay value; ie making the main thing the main thing. He sold off the loss-leading Legoland parks, which were quickly turned into a profitable operation by companies that had expertise in that area, while still providing a huge marketing boost for the company. He shut down other lines that were spurious to the core business, including a line of girls’ jewellery. Put simply, he started with the foundations, and refocused Lego on what Lego was actually all about. 

What is the Church really for? If we can answer that, we’ve got a shot at rebuilding it

Part of that meant re-engaging Lego‘s fans and re-awakening the dormant passions of the generations who had grown up with it. Once seen simply as a children’s toy, it was rebranded as a fun activity for every age, partly through the introduction of more challenging sets for over-16s, and largely through the introduction of the democratic ‘Lego Ideas’ programme. This crowd-sourcing initiative, which enables fans and budding Lego designers to submit, vote on and even earn from new sets, has spawned a number of creative offerings as diverse as a Lego Polaroid camera and the McCallisters’ house from the movie Home Alone. It demonstrated a crucial understanding of the “create, curate, collaborate” characteristics of Gen Z – identified by Google as the key traits that any successful 21st-century brand needs to comprehend – and won the company legions of new fans.

By 2015, Lego was once again atop the toy world – and the Christmas lists of children and adults alike. By listening to consumers, refocusing on their central business and cutting back on unnecessary innovations way out of their lane, the company completed a total reversal of fortune. Now, with various toy ranges, movies, video games and more, the brand is again everywhere, but these expansions are due to the stability of the core product, not a thin-spreading web of sprawling overreach. Thanks to Vig Knudstorp’s laser focus, no one is any doubt about what Lego is, or what it’s for.  

Purpose-driven Lego

So why on earth is any of this relevant to the Church? Because as Page pointed out, the institution broadly finds itself in a moment of rapid decline – and, just like Lego, it has seemingly tried everything to get out of the nosedive. Churches have attempted to become more relevant to the times, aping modern musical styles and prioritising ‘excellence’, as if a free Krispy Kreme and a smoke machine will make the difference to a person seeking meaning in their lives. Christians have developed legions of courses, initiatives, books and film series. There have been expensive and ambitious festivals and events designed to gather the Church, build confidence and attract outsiders (and yes, if you’re paying attention, that’s what I do for a living). 

None of these things are wrong per se; just as there was clearly a market for Legoland and Lego-based video games, no one is suggesting that the latest prayer course or stadium gathering are bad news. But the lesson of Lego is that these things are the cherries on the proverbial icing. The really important question is about the nature of the cake: at its heart, what is the Church really for? If we can answer that, we’ve got a shot at rebuilding it in a way that’s fit for purpose in 2025…brick by brick.

To hotfoot from one megalithic cultural icon to another, Rick Warren’s 1995 book The Purpose Driven Church (Zondervan) makes a fair attempt at answering that question. He writes: “Every church needs to grow warmer through fellowship, deeper through discipleship, stronger through worship, broader through ministry, and larger through evangelism.” These five aims are not plucked from Warren’s brain; they’re based on Jesus’ Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37) and Great Commission (Matthew 28:18). All five of them actually point towards the same goal; following Jesus’ example in interacting with his Father, each other and the world. So, to boil that down even further: one might articulate that the Church’s job is to love.

How well are we doing at that? Or to put it another way: if a great innovator like Vig Knudstorp was brought in to turn around the Church, how far might he feel we’ve drifted from the heart of that mission?

The brick kingdom

Allow me a brief diversion. The financial recovery story is far from the only interesting aspect of the world’s most lucrative toy brand. Our fascination with Lego – born in childhood but continuing way beyond it for many people – makes theological sense. Even if we don’t feel like it, we’re creative people, because we’re made in the image of the creator God. Creativity is a gift that some people have in abundance, but it’s present in all of us in some way or another.

Additionally, we’re created by, and in the image of, a God who is always building. From the first to the last page of the Bible, we read of a God who is constantly recreating the world; and in the era of the advancing kingdom in which we now find ourselves, he calls us to do the same. Jesus tells Peter that he will build his Church on the disciples’ shoulders (Matthew 16:18), illustrating and embodying the collaborative creativity that’s baked into heaven’s advance on earth. So, it’s no surprise that Lego – which places raw materials in our hands and invites us to make something out of a kind of plastic rubble – instinctively feels good. In fact, to take it a step further; Lego is a specific kind of creative activity that involves not only making but re-making. We pull our models apart and rebuild them as something even better. Which is exactly what God’s kingdom is all about. “He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’” (Revelation 21:5).

This is where the rediscovered core purpose of Lego intersects with the heart of the Church. Our job is to love, and the way we do that is by joining in with God’s great rebuild. We’re called to the simple task of placing one brick on top of another, for the sake of joy and for the sake of love. In a sense, Lego helps us to remember who we are.

Everything could be awesome

When Page imagined a decimated Church, he described an institution that had lost sight of its true purpose. It had become stuck in its ways and yet disconnected from the elements of the traditions that had made it so popular and loved. It had become insular and inward-focused; detached from the community around it. These are all plausible directions for the Church – and every local church – to unfortunately move in, and Page was right: they absolutely will lead to decline. In some places that story is already unfolding. 

All churches have strengths and weaknesses. Some have lost sight of (or deliberately put down) some of the core purposes explored by Rick Warren: evangelism gets toned down by a misquote of St Francis of Assisi (“if necessary, use words”); worship becomes a performance instead of praise; discipleship is a low-bar social club with a side of intellectual conversation. Yet perhaps more unforgivably than any of that, many of us have just got so tied up in knots of internal politics and dogma that we’ve forgotten the main mission to which we’re called.

Lego is a creative activity that involves not only making but re-making. Which is exactly what the kingdom of God is all about

Remarkably, Lego seems to provide us with an unlikely case study of a global institution which found itself facing the same risks and yet recovered magnificently. The company’s greatest rebuild of all could serve as an inspiration for our own. Christian faith, just like Lego, is easy enough for a child to grasp, and deep enough to be enjoyed and explored for a lifetime. 

The lesson is simple: get the centre right, and everything else can be built from there. By remembering our core purpose, growing connections with our communities and rediscovering the best parts of what made us so popular in the first place, perhaps the Church itself could become a great turnaround case study, all of its own.