I took in a Reds/Mets game last weekend at Great American Ballpark and found myself sitting in a seat surrounded by Mets fans. I would cheer and they would groan, or they would cheer and I would groan. It was a beautiful day, a close game, and some politer-than-NFL-game banter going back and forth.

I started to have a conversation with an older guy in a Mets jersey sitting a couple of stadium seats away. He had some questions, like, “What is the deal with Reds players putting on a Viking helmet?” (The answer is they don the Viking horns and cape after hitting a home run.) Or as we approached the seventh inning stretch, he asked if we had any unusual traditions. (We sing ‘God Bless America’ in addition to the obligatory ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’.) In return, he started to share with me what it was like growing up five minutes away from where the Mets play.

He told me that the entrance to the ballpark is loosely based on the Rotunda of Ebbets Field where the Dodgers played. A chandelier made out of baseballs and bats hung in the entryway of the Mets’ original stadium like the one Dodgers fans were used to. (The Mets started to fill the baseball void in New York City after the Dodgers and the Giants went out west.) The neighborhood around the ballpark was largely Italian before the population changed, so a Sicilian song “C’e La Luna Mezzo Mare” is part of the seventh inning stretch. Mostly though, I saw the passion in this man’s face as he recalled going to ball games with his dad, who always preferred to take the subway to the ballpark for a nickel.

After the game I started to think about the formative power of traditions when you are exposed to them at a young age. I imagine that if you went to games with your dad over 60 years ago, you are much more likely to be a fan of that team and continue to go to games later in your life. The sights, smells and traditions of baseball take you back in time to an emotional place of joy and delight. You might even travel all the way from New York City to Cincinnati just to watch your team play.

Our faith in God can be like that too. I can never remember a time when I didn’t know about God or didn’t attend church regularly. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to tell my parents I was going to sleep in or do something else on a Sunday morning besides go to church. I am pretty sure I would have been dragged out of bed by my big toe and told to get moving quickly in the right direction.

The religious traditions handed down to me run deep. I knew that my grandaddy woke up every morning and got on his knees to pray for all of his grandkids by name. I knew not to dive into the food on my plate before a prayer of thanks was offered. The religious holidays came with regularity, and they unfolded in largely the same way year after year with the same lessons attached, but with deeper understanding as I matured. Religion wasn’t like a foreign object aggressively drilled into me. It was more like the air I breathed, the environment I inhabited.

Deuteronomy 6:6-8 describes the consistency and regularity in raising a child in the faith: “These commandments that I give to you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them to your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.”

In a similar kind of vein. Proverbs 22:6 tells us to: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

I wouldn’t be the first one to note a shift away from church attendance in our culture. Things that I grew up with and took as a matter of course are now not the average experience for a child growing up in our country. In every church I have served, I have seen parents of younger children struggle with the demands competing for attention on Sunday mornings, whether it is a sports competition, or a dance recital, or just plain skipping church because everyone is overtired from a jam-packed week. Missed Sundays tend to clump up and follow one another until you realize you are out of the habit of going to church altogether. The pandemic did not help us on this issue. Whenever it comes up in conversation with other pastors, I realize that most of us have people who were part of our churches pre-pandemic who drifted away and never came back. The world has a way of peeling people away from Christianity, and for some families the deeply-ingrained formative habits of going to church are broken altogether.

If I could give Christian parents any advice at all, it would be to teach consistency and commitment to your religious values and practices over a long period of time, especially when your children are smaller. The patterns set for your children will have more of a staying power throughout their lifetimes and give them a solid foundation for whatever they encounter. Even if they leave those traditions and practices, there may come a time when they return to them, finding the place of spiritual joy and delight later in life because of the influence you had on them. Be careful, teach your children well, as you model for them what it means to follow God.

Derek Russell is pastor of the Hillsboro Global Methodist Church. He loves Jesus, family, dogs and football.