Are you familiar with Mr. Potato Head — a Playskool/Hasbro toy that originally came out in the 1950s? Mr. Potato Head was so popular that he was included as a character in the Toy Story movies. He has also been a regular in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as a Mr. Potato Head balloon.

Originally Mr. Potato Head was a box of separate plastic parts with pushpins that could be stuck into a real potato. (However, because of getting so many complaints about rotting potatoes and due to new government safety regulations, in 1964 Hasbro started including a plastic potato body in the Mr. Potato Head set.) I had the original when I was a child. It was great fun to play with. I always liked getting out of the box with Mr. Potato Head and pinning the his parts in unusual places on the potato. I created some strange looking Mr. Potato Heads.

Perhaps church has done the same thing I did and produced some unusual concepts of the body of Christ. Can you imagine a Mr. Potato Head with rows of ears lined up all over his body facing one solitary mouth? That’s been the primary way that church has been structured since the first few centuries. We’ve lined up rows of passive listeners (ears) to sit and hear one man (1 mouth) talk. However, the Bible asks an interesting question about the entire body of Christ being reduced to ears: “If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Corinthians 12:17)

Perhaps we could to allow for the many various parts of the body of Christ to share in a church meeting instead of leaving everything under the control of one part acting as the mouth. 1 Corinthians 12:14 reads: “The body is not made up of one part but of many.”

There are so many gifted people in any gathering of Christ-followers and the Holy Spirit wants to use all of them. Perhaps it is time to let some of the many ears in our churches have the freedom to be the parts of the body God is calling them to be.

Perhaps we need to go beyond Mr. Potato Head and allow the living, resurrected Jesus to be the literal, controlling Head when His body meets together. Learn more about how to do that here. If you live in Nashville, come and see various parts of the body expressing their gifts as they are prompted by the Spirit at The Salvation Army Berry Street, 225 Berry St., Nashville 37207 on Sundays at 10:45 am.