Over the last year, Spencer has been building a pair of Lego models of the Clarenville and Burgoyne’s Cove church buildings—built at the scale of one Lego “stud” (the basic unit of Lego blocks, demarcated by one of the nubs that let the bricks interlock) to one foot.
“I started collecting all the bricks I’d need and I did some measurements in the churches and worked out everything and started building,” he says. “It’s taken a year and a fair number of Lego orders to get all the pieces I needed, but I think it came out more or less as I was hoping it would.”
His creations measure around one foot by two feet in width, he says, and replicate everything from the churches’ accessibility ramps to their stained-glass windows, with minifigure parishioners in the pews. He started the models as a way to say thank you to the two churches in the parish for the warm welcome their congregants had given him in his first year of ministry. And when they were finished, the reaction was bigger than he could have expected.
“I wanted to do it as something that they could have in their church they would enjoy. And it’s talked about everywhere. I rarely run into someone who doesn’t mention it to me. It’s spread all over Facebook,” he says. “And it’s getting attention to the church that, well, the church is enjoying because you know how it is these days – sometimes the church kind of gets lost in the background.”
Spencer is also reaching out to make the church a presence in people’s lives through a new Lego outreach ministry at the church. Organizers have been building up a collection of bricks donated by parishioners and community members until they had critical mass to start the program, which involves local children coming by the church to build for fun and the occasional challenge project. There’s no overtly religious element, says Spencer, who also runs a Dungeons and Dragons game for some kids at the local middle school. But it doesn’t have to be overtly religious to be a valuable form of outreach.
“I’m a big believer that the church needs to connect with our young people without necessarily always throwing Scripture at them,” he says. “I’ve got a group of kids at the Dungeons and Dragons event, at the Lego who, later on in their life, no matter what they hear people [saying] about the church, any negative things, they’ll look back and say ‘Yeah, I remember people from my church. Reverend James would come and play Dungeons and Dragons with me. He seemed like a nice guy.’”
If the church starts by being a positive presence in their young lives, he believes, that will pay off in the form of better relations in the long run. He currently has about a dozen kids coming to the Lego ministry, which began in late March, and a rotating group of eight or nine players in his Dungeons and Dragons game.
In the meantime, building models of the parish’s churches has become a way of drawing attention from outside the bigger versions’ walls.
“The Anglican church has spent an awful long time stuck in our buildings, dreaming of the days when people came to the buildings out of, well, basically out of expectation and tradition. And those days are over. We need to be out in the community. I’d rather people see my church everywhere else and just sometimes in our building.”