Bradford City’s season can be summed up in one name “Andy Cook.” Over this season, he scored an impressive haul of 31 Goals, 28 in the league. This means he was scoring a goal every 121 minutes. His nearest rival, Sam Hoskins at Northampton Town was scoring every 163 minutes. Cook was the stand out player in the League.
You expect a team with a striker who can guarantee more than 20 goals in a season to be up there at the top of the table, scoring for fun. Yet, although City had a decent run in the last half of the season, they failed to make it into the automatic promotion spots and fell short in the playoffs when Cook failed to score.
There in lies the problem. If Andy Cook wasn’t scoring, then it wasn’t clear where the goals were going to come from. I can speak from experiencing of watching a game when Cook was marked out of the game. It petered out into a dull, goalless draw. Cook’s 28 goals in the league were about half of their goals scored. Admittedly it was a low scoring league generally this year but that probably only goes to show why really the team could have ran away with things. But after Cook, other players simply weren’t hitting the target, the next top scorer for the team got just 6 goals all season (that’s right six). The reality was that Bradford were to all intents and purposes a one man show this year.
Not only did it limit their potential this season but it has introduced an element of risk for next year. Cook’s contract is up and although he has been offered a new one, he can easily move on to another team who will either pay him more and/or offer him the opportunity to play at a higher level. This is a realistic possibility and if he goes, without a large transfer fee to pay for his replacement, it is quite possible that the Bantams will struggle to score many at all.
It’s important that church doesn’t become a one man show. This can happen when the expectation is upon the pastor to be omnicompetent, the one who leads the services, preaches, takes the Bible studies, makes the big decisions, does all the pastoral visiting, perhaps with a little bit of support from his wife. Sometimes this happens because people expect the pastor to do everything, sometimes it’s because he tries to do everything and refuses to relax his grip on control. This is neither healthy for the pastor and his family nor the church.
A healthy church will have a genuinely plural leadership with others sharing the responsibility for preaching, teaching, pastoral care and leading the church in vision. A healthy church will also be one where we see every member ministry as all believers in the church are involved, using their gifts, sharing their faith, bearing one another’s burdens. Don’t let your church become reliant on one person. Not only does that create risks if that person finds themselves unable to serve for a period for whatever reason, it also seriously reduces the capacity of the church to share the good news about Jesus.
Faithroots 