Time for Change

Dear Huffman UMC Family,

After a great deal of prayer and discernment with my wife Carrie, I have made the difficult decision to leave Huffman. This process has been a long time in the making, and I don’t want anyone to feel like they have done anything to run me off or hurt my feelings (or those of my wife). I am leaving Huffman without resentment or anger, and I still believe that the church on Gene Reed Road has a vital role to play in the community around it. Unfortunately, I simply do not see myself being a part of that role. I request that this decision be respected as a final one. The purpose of this letter is not to solicit reasons to reconsider, but to part with Huffman UMC on good terms.

I want my reasons for leaving the church to clear. When my family left Huffman in 2002, there was a bitterness to our departure that left me feeling like I still had unfinished business there. When I came back in 2010, it was with great joy and relief to be in a familiar place with a church family that I knew cared for me. I want to thank everyone, and in particular, the folks in Limbo, for giving me a chance to come back and feel welcomed with open arms.

During the last four years, Huffman gave me a place to grow spiritually without feeling judged, and that has meant the world to me. Huffman also gave me a chance to believe I can be a leader in the church. I was privileged enough to serve on the Staff Parish Relations Committee from 2011-2013, during which time I feel we made important progress towards equipping Huffman with a staff that is ready and able to meet the needs of the congregation and community. Most importantly, the last four years have taught me that I have something to offer to the church; that regardless of my own imperfections, God can use me in the service of His kingdom.

The previous point is one of the primary reasons now is a good time for me to find a new church home. Huffman is the church I “grew up” in, both during my teens and a difficult time during my 20’s. It is the church my family attended and worked in. But it is not the same church my family went to, and it shouldn’t be. I am not the same person I was four years ago when I returned to Huffman. Huffman is a comfortable, secure place for me, but what I need now is a place for my family to live into the identities that God is calling us to. To move forward, I have to leave what is comfortable for new challenges, new friendships, and new opportunities for service.

I do not want anyone to misunderstand me on this point. I do not feel like Huffman has “failed” me or doesn’t care about me. My family and I have a lot of history with Huffman, good history, but the plain fact of the matter is I need a church home where I don’t have a family history. To be faithful to my identity in Christ, I need to find a church where people’s ideas about who I am are not defined by who my parents and grandparents were. I need to find a church without preconceived expectations about who I am based on who I was 15 years ago, or even 4 years ago.

In the same way, Huffman is not the same church it was 15, 20, or 30 years ago, and this is a good and natural thing. I firmly believe that Huffman UMC has a wonderful opportunity to serve the community around it in new, Christ-inspired ways. But to do that, it needs the room to develop a church identity that is not burdened by the history of the church it used to be. I see new and different faces emerging to lead Huffman, with new ideas about what the church can be. I applaud that. At the same time, I recognize that I am part of Huffman UMC’s history, not its future. As much as I need to make this change to become who God is calling me to be, I believe Huffman needs the voices of the past to give way to the voices of the future. If I can offer one hope for the church, it is this: that Huffman UMC will embrace the changing nature of its mission, let go of its past, and open itself to what God is calling it to be. Instead of clinging to the question “How can we get back to what we used to be?” I hope Huffman UMC will fearlessly pursue the question “Who are we called to be now?”

The first time I left Huffman, it wasn’t on my own terms, and it didn’t feel good. Now, I am choosing to leave on my own terms, and I have zero regrets about the time and energy I’ve invested into being a part of the Huffman UMC family. As my wife and I embark on the next step in our journey, I want you all to know that we love you very much, and this is not goodbye. We may not see you at the building on Gene Reed Road, but the relationships we have at Huffman are important to us. When Limbo officially disbanded a few months ago, we made a promise to stay in intentional relationship with one another, and it is my hope that the same will be true of the other relationships I have been fortunate enough to build with the rest of my church family.

With Love in Christ,

Philip Gibson

Predicting the Pirates - A Fan with Statistics

I've been a Pirates fan since 1991 (I was seven years old then), and for the first two seasons, I thought the Pirates always made the playoffs. The next two decades beat that assumption out of me to say the least. For 20 of the previous 22 seasons, the Pirates have broken my heart over and over. During the 2000's, I stopped caring for a while. They were so bad that I had no glimmer of expectation that my Bucs would ever break the .500 line again.

...Then this decade happened. The Pirates have improved each of the last three seasons since 2010, which wasn't that hard considering how bad they had been. In some ways though, it's been worse to be a fan these last couple of years. Each of the last two seasons, we've been wooed by the promise that the Pirates might actually finish the season with a winning record, or better yet, maybe even make the playoffs. Both times, the Bucs came back to earth and broke our hearts all over again. Last year was the worst, when the Pirates entered were 18 games above .500 in August and still found a way to finish with a losing record.

This year, it seems like we might actually have a winning season. We've been consistently above .500 since April 19th, and have what "looks" like an outstanding pitching staff. I say that it "looks" like it is outstanding because it looked great last year too, before falling apart late in the season.

I wanted to get a good sense of where the Pirates should be at the end of the season based on the way they've been performing. Being a stats "guy", I went over to http://www.baseball-reference.com/, which is a sports statistician's goldmine. I pulled the team pitching and batting statistics for the last four seasons (2009-2012) to figure out the best predictors for end-of-season win totals. I looked at, literally, dozens of different stats and ran all sorts of models (nothing too fancy, but too boring to detail here). I found out that the two team stats that really seem to matter are ballpark adjusted ERA (ERA+) and ballpark adjusted OPS (OPS+). Together, these two team statistics account for 85% of the variability in teams' win totals at the end of the season. That's pretty impressive for two statistics.

ERA+ and OPS+ are essentially measures that attempt to normalize pitcher and batter performances in terms of both league averages and ballpark conditions. If a pitcher has an ERA+ of over 100 it means, accounting for the ballparks he pitched in, he allowed fewer runs than the average pitcher in the league. OPS+ does the same thing for batters, but with the more complicated OPS statistic (which accounts for both slugging percentage and on base percentage). If a batter has an OPS+ above 100, then that batter reached base, hit for extra bases, or did both more often than the average batter in the league.

Using the ERA+/OPS+ model to predict the number of wins a team should have at the end of the season, I compared the predicted number of wins to the actual number of wins that the Pirates had from 2009-2012. The model has a standard error estimate of 4.56, meaning that it should predict, within 4 1/2 games, the number of wins the Pirates had during those seasons. It did. Here are the results of my analysis -

The quality of the table isn't great, but it's easy to see that the predicted wins are very close to the actual wins. 2012 is the only year where the "Real Wins" were at the upper limit of the margin of error, and it actually looks like the Pirates should have finished worse that year.

2013 looks pretty murky for the Pirates to me. Based on the model, the Pirates should finish with around 86 wins, which is above .500 (yay!) but isn't likely to get them into the playoffs (boo!). It looks like the pitching staff is, indeed, performing better than the average staff in the league, but not by a whole lot (Texas and Atlanta have team ERA+'s of 123 and 122, respectively). The batting is below average, but no where near the league cellar (The White Sox and Marlins have teams OPS+'s of 77 and 70, respectively).

To sum it up, the Pirates are the definition of an average team this year. They are a little above average in pitching, a little below average in batting, and should finish somewhere in the neighborhood of .500 this year if they stay that way (a big if). The lowest estimated win total for the year is just below 82, which is the magic number for a non-losing season, so I would expect things to get pretty tight around August-September. Until they get their OPS+ at or above 100, I don't expect the Pirates to contend for the division or the Wild Card. As a fan, I'd love for my Bucs to wind up in the playoffs, but right now, I'll settle for a realistic expectation that they will be just a little better than they were last year.

What I want to hear in a debate...

I've been watching the debates and looking at the platforms all election season. I would categorize myself, generally, as a moderate-liberal, whatever that actually means these days. I say that in the interest of full disclosure.

I came away Tuesday night feeling incredibly frustrated with both Romney and Obama. It started with the first question, which was particularly relevant to me as a twenty something aspiring PhD in Sociology. Here's a link to the debate video. The education question and both candidates' responses run from the one minute mark to the nine minute mark.

http://www.youtube.com/politics?feature=etp-pv-ype-3bff3fd3f0

Eight minutes, and neither candidate could give a real solution to the job crisis recent college graduates are currently facing. Sure, I've heard talk of increasing manufacturing jobs, which helps people with those kinds of degrees or training. But much of my generation, who were born in the mid eighties and nineties, had a very different idea of the work we would be doing when we grew up. Traditional manufacturing jobs aren't going to do a lot for us. And neither is promising a return to the economic status-quo of the late nineties and early 2000's.  A lot of us, myself included, went into knowledge producing fields because that's what we were prepared for throughout our entire lives. For my part, my education set me on a very specific path to study social behavior, use statistics, and perform generally intellectual work. Now, when folks like me ask where the jobs are, it seems that the only answers are that we are over-educated, lacking marketable skills, and should have been more practical.

That answer isn't good enough. You don't get to raise an entire generation to march into a new century of promise, wonder, and progress, then blame them for their unemployment when the last generations' greed and irresponsibility put us in this predicament.

The larger issue for me is that my generation is going to be paying for the sins of our parents' generation. We are going to have to pay off the national deficit. We are going to have to find a way to support an increasing proportion of senior citizens. We are going to have to clean up the mess. And it is frustrating.

My generation has the education and know-how to get work done faster than our parents did, yet we are still paid, for the most part, according to our time rather than our results. We are concerned with sustainability because we have to be, because environmental issues are already affecting us. And we are willing to sacrifice for the greater good, as evidenced by the number of young soldiers who have given their lives in wars started before a lot of us could even vote.

I want to hear about fundamental changes we can make as a country to give millennial generation a shot at the society we dreamed of. Where we work to live, not live to work. Where we can finish our education and actually use our degrees. Where we don't have to spend our entire lives paying down the last generations' debts. Where we are willing to put people over principles. And where young people are actually rewarded for being more productive than their parents were.

That last point is really important to me. Work has changed in the last twenty years dramatically, but we still use an arcane system to reimburse people for what they do. I can find, retrieve, and summarize exponentially more academic literature than graduate students even ten years ago. It's not because I'm "better", it's because technology allows me to do more in less time. Logically, that means I should either a) be able to spend less time working and receive the same compensation (adjusted for inflation) or b) be paid more for being able to get more done. Neither, however, is actually the case. Instead, academic positions have become increasingly competitive and less secure. And that's just me. Our society has changed tremendously and is continuing to change at an even quicker rate, but we are playing by social and economic rules that are outdated and, frankly, counterproductive.

Give me a candidate who understands and is willing to deal with that, and I will gladly deliver my vote.

How Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu made my life better.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a martial art that has gained a lot of popularity since the 1990's, when it was used to great effect by Royce Gracie to dominate the early UFC tournaments. Perhaps due to its usage in the mixed-martial arts world, BJJ is associated with the more competitive aspects of martial arts, but for me, it's been a window into a better understanding of myself and others. It has improved my life physically, mentally, and spiritually in ways I can't completely understand. But I felt inspired by the following video to share some of my experiences. Here, Rener Gracie talks about using BJJ to solve bullying problems in school.



As I told one of my BJJ instructors yesterday, I had not been a physically active person in a very long time when I started training. At the age of 27 I was not as healthy as I felt like I should be, and I was tired of feeling like crap about it. A year and a half later, that has definitely changed. But, more importantly, BJJ has helped me deal with some issues that have bothered me since I was a kid.

I was bullied a lot as a kid, and it killed my self-esteem. I remember very clearly being in fifth grade and getting beat up by a bully on the playground. A kid threw me on the ground and hit me, then held me down while a girl kicked me. It was humiliating and made me feel inferior. I've carried that with me for a long time. In middle school, a group of kids threw me down a hill, then held me down and beat me up again during recess. These were "good kids" in the eyes of others, and I remember feeling so awful about myself because no one stood up for me. I wasn't very popular, and I internalized that as I grew up.

I remember telling my teachers about bullying incidents, but this only made it worse for me. From then on I felt like I couldn't handle my own problems, and other kids ostracized me because the only way I could deal with conflict was to tattle-tell. It's no wonder I've had self-esteem problems my whole life.

BJJ changed my life not only by making me more physically fit, but by changing how I see myself in relation to others. When you are routinely grappling with people who are bigger and stronger than you, and surviving, it changes your mindset. I am no where near being a competitive BJJ player, but I feel like I can survive and keep myself from being harmed against an untrained opponent. That level of confidence alone changes the level of confidence I bring to interacting with other people in a variety of situations.

In the film Red Belt, the main character provides an excellent insight on conflict.

"Everything has a force. You embrace it or deflect it. Why oppose it?"

Rener Gracie says something very similar in the Bully Proof promotions when he says that BJJ teaches people to fight fire with water, instead of more fire. This is a core concept in BJJ, that if we try to meet strength with strength, we are leaving too much to chance. Instead, we use technique, leverage, and our knowledge to escape and reverse a situation. This is a huge life lesson that, to me, can only be taught through experience. In the relative safety of the school, or barra, we experience what it is to be threatened, to lose, and to stop using direct force to deal with the threat. It is a lab for life.

I've noticed a huge difference in how I deal with things, and how I respond to things, since taking up BJJ. I realize, most of the time, that responding to insults and offenses by getting angry and offended is absolutely pointless. Understanding the situation and changing the terms so that everyone can learn something, or at the very least, removing myself from harms way, has been a much less stressful way to go about my business. I'm still getting better at this (I'm a white belt in more ways than one), but the difference has already been huge.

Spiritually, BJJ has given me an awareness that is very difficult to explain. When you are grappling, or rolling, with someone, you have to be present without over-asserting your will over the situation. There is an ebb and flow of action and reaction, and I feel at my best when I am mindfully waiting for my opportunity to act, and acting quickly when it arises. This helps in my faith walk tremendously. In Christianity, and any other spiritual discipline, it is easy to get caught up in the determinism vs free will argument. The practice of BJJ, however, has revealed a complimentary relationship between choice and non-choice for me. Just like in the gym, there are opportunities to act in our lives, but there may only be a one or two "good" choices at a given time. The more we practice, the more natural those choices become, until they are such a part of ourselves that we simply "do" instead of "decide".

All of this is simply to say that BJJ, as a discipline, is an enormous benefit to my life. I'd like to encourage anyone who is struggling with their physical fitness, their state-of-mind, or anything else to take a look at it. If you are a parent of a child who is suffering from bullying or just poor self-esteem to look for a BJJ school that will work with them. Rener's system, Bully Proof, is well organized and has generally been well received, so I might start there (I have no skin in the game on this one, I'm just a believer). However, there are tons of BJJ schools out there with lots of approaches, so take a look and see what you like. Speaking from my experience, though, if a kid is being bullied, you need to equip them to deal with it because they will carry it with them well into adulthood.

BJJ will push you and challenge you in ways you will not be able to predict. It requires discipline, humility, openness, humor, and respect. But the returns are exponential.


~Phil

Living in Two Worlds - Intellectual and/or Christian

I've been thinking about a life question of mine lately. I think most of us can relate to the idea that we are citizens of more than one social world. I also think that most of us can relate to the idea that occasionally those worlds come into conflict, and this can cause stress.

For me, the identifiers "Intellectual" and "Christian" have at varying times worked well together and caused enormous internal strife. There have been times that I would consider myself an "Intellectual Christian", that is, someone who is following the Way but claims not to be "one of those idiots". There have been other times that I would consider myself a "Christian Intellectual", that is, a thinker who somehow still manages to have faith. The problem always seems to be deciding which one is my "dominant" identifier.

I've found recently that I do better when I am unaware of my identifiers. This is difficult to explain. There are times that I am simply ignorant to the labels that get thrown around about certain types of people, and in this ignorance I feel less pressure to fit into a certain box. I think it is that way for most people.

One of the joys of functioning in both the church and academia is that I see a lot of symmetry. It seems to me that people are people no matter where you go, even if a lot of important details change from one place to the next. This used to bum me out, but now I feel enriched by the experiences I get to have in a variety of environments. I don't know how this happened, but I'm glad it has.

One of the things I have noticed is that, social structures aside, situations work best when the right people are involved. This is challenging and encouraging. How we define "right people" may depend heavily on the situation at hand.

I'm thinking a lot about the research topic I discussed in my last post. I got some feedback from two colleagues yesterday, and one of them pointed out that my focus was on the negative aspects of being a minister in the Methodist church. I had not really thought about it, but I realized this was a very important insight. In studying how the lives of pastors are impacted by the expectations and roles they live out, I've been presumptuous in thinking that the only impacts I will see are stress and distress. But what about people who are deeply fulfilled by challenging other peoples' views, or who have unique gifts that allow them to handle conflict with incredible grace (just to speculate)?

I'm interested in the interaction between person and situation, and this seems particularly relevant in the relationship between pastors, their churches, and their well-being. I think my focus on distressing outcomes for pastors assumed that the individual (minister) was a subject of the roles and expectations embedded in their situation, and not a participant. In addition to looking at negative outcomes, such as a pastor burning out or selling out, I should also be interested in how people succeed in both conviction and well being. What constellations of pastor characteristics and congregation characteristics work? How do negative experiences help leaders mature instead of giving up on or giving in to difficult situations?

In other words, how do ministers stay happy and just in the face of difficult circumstance? I don't think it is a simple matter of "moral fiber", but I wonder if there are some common factors both in terms of life experiences and social support. Does a pastor both have to have the "right stuff" and the "right people" to make it through the world with their soul intact? Do we all?