Its a bit of a sad day for Docker fans because Chris Connolly, coach of the Freo club has pulled the pin. After a pretty disastrous season he has fallen on his sword and accepted personal responsibility for the state the club is in. He will move on and Freo will try and find another Messiah to lead them to the promised land (just to mix metaphors a little)

Connolly couldn’t ‘deliver’ on the goods over the time he was at Fremantle and after much speculation he has stepped down. The underlying belief here is ‘if we get the right coach then he will enable us to win more games and ultimately we will be a premiership side‘.

It is some of the thinking that is being applied in Oz evangelical churches at the moment where if the senior pastor can’t deliver on the KPI’s of the church – which usually includes an appropriate number of conversions – then he is held responsible and asked to resign. (This is the theory, but I am yet to see any church implement it, nor any pastor resign due to his inability to deliver.) The phrase ‘back the jockey – not the horse’ is one I have heard often, used to imply that the key element in seeing churches deliver on conversion growth is the right senior pastor. I hear the rhetoric, but is any pastor really going to fall on his sword and call himself ‘incompetent’, or is any board really going to sack a faithful diligent worker because he can’t deliver conversions?

While I applaud missionary endeavour and the call to better efforts I can’t help think its a little more complex than both of these situations seem to suggest.