Our Pastimes (Bot9 #276)
Do you ever think about how you pass your time? I know I do. As the day moves from morning to evening, I have a sense of what I’m doing to pass the time that day. I think all of us take some time in reflecting on how we’re spending our days and and years on some level.
The term “national pastime” was given to baseball in the 1850s. According to John Thorn, author of Total Baseball, the term was applied to baseball in an effort to connect baseball to the public’s health and well-being. Can you imagine a single game occupying a nation’s consciousness in this way? At the time, basketball was still 40 years away from being invented and the first college football game was still 20 years away from being played. Baseball was a game used to pass the time and connect people.
In the late 1920s, an invention came along that would impact how we pass our time - the television. As the other two sports grew in popularity, the television would have a profound impact on how people would pass their time by watching sports. Did baseball manage to maintain its moniker as the “national pastime” through this technological advance?
If you look at the history of each sport’s championship series or game, the answer is clearly no. Though it’s an “apples and oranges” argument when you consider a series versus a game, far fewer watch the World Series or NBA Finals as compared to the Super Bowl. The most watched World Series game in history was Game 7 of the 1986 World Series - the game after the Buckner ground ball featuring two teams from two massive markets who had been without a title for many years. Somewhere between 55-60 million people tuned in to that game. Do you know when the Super Bowl crested that same number of viewers? Super Bowl IV in 1970 between the Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings. Not exactly two massive markets. Watching football in the fall has been this nation’s pastime for quite some time.
Baseball still has an edge on basketball, right? Not so much. Around 2010, the NBA Finals began to fetch an audience of around 10 million per game consistently for the first time in league history, while the World Series slipped below an average audience of 10 million for the first time. Unless there’s a compelling storyline like the Chicago Cubs breaking their championship drought, interest in the game seems to be waning. This year’s series between the Nationals and Astros saw four of its seven games set the record for the lowest audience for that particular game in MLB history.
Bummer, right? Now, there are numbers on the positive side as well. Annual attendance at MLB and MiLB games still dwarf that of the other sports and baseball participation on the rise nationally. But that’s not the point I want to make. Everything we once valued has gotten less popular because of the number of options available at our fingertips today. This has had an impact on the game of baseball, but also on the foundations of faith in our country.
The website FiveThirtyEight produced an article on December 12 titled “Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back.” There’s a lot of interesting information in the article for those of us who love faith and love baseball. For a long time, people would assume that the next generation would just come back to church once they had kids. That’s not happening any more. It’s like the church was James Earl Jones expecting “people will come” and acted like church was “the one constant through all the years.” But now, in the millennial generation, a person is almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian.
What if the answer to changing this momentum is how we spend our time? What if we treated God and His Word as the most interesting thing you get to experience on a daily basis? I know I’m as guilty as the next baseball coach or player who has walked down Twitter hole after Twitter hole about hitting theories or drills or metrics or velocity improvement. Those things are great. It’s fueling the influx of players playing the game. But what if we found God as interesting?
The funny thing is that He is. Studying God and the Bible is the most interesting thing available to us. I’ve never encountered anything else like it. For example, I listened to an hour-long message from our pastor this week about this one line from Matthew 2 - “during the time of King Herod.” Do you know about Herod and his accomplishments coupled with his pride? That one line has incredible weight as it applies the time in which Jesus was born. We should want to know as much about that as we do about the spin rate of a four-seam fastball at the top of the strike zone.
I’m not suggesting that we abandon our passion for the game or the joy it provides. What I am suggesting is that God deserves that same level of passion and interest. If we were as geeked up about learning about all of the covenants God has made with His people, it would fuel the joy we feel for Him and all that He has created. After all, He created exit velocities and launch angles, too.
Join me this Christmas season and coming year in the #BibleProjectChallenge. The Bible Project has a ton of videos available to make your journey of knowledge enjoyable and deep. They connect the dots and feed a passion for God and His Word. My family and I have started to gather in front of the TV, journals in hand, to watch and discuss different Bible Project videos. I want God and the Bible to be the single-most interesting thing I look at every day and every week. As I grow, I know that my coaching of people and the game will grow as well. Make God your pastime and draw people to Him because He’s just so amazing.
Questions:
In the Batter’s Box (Personal) - How do you pass your time? Where does thinking about or studying God fit into your day or week? How might you elevate the amount of time or level of passion you invest moving forward?
In the Bullpen (Small group, Relationships) - Who encourages you with passionate discussions of God? Who can you connect with in your sphere of influence to discuss God and His Word?
In the Postgame Circle (Large groups) - How can you promote unity on your team, or in your church, school, or community of faith? Where can you focus on others and show how your faith is overflowing into service?