You can take the individual out of the Lutheran Parsonage but not the Lutheran Parsonage out of the individual...

...It is hard to believe that the conditions under which one lived during one’s formative years leave no traces in one’s later life. In the event, one can take an individual out of a Lutheran parsonage—I doubt whether one can take the parsonage out of the individual. The powerful language of Luther’s German translation of the Bible and the powerful music of Lutheran hymnody must inevitably reverberate even in the consciousness of individuals whose ties with the Lutheran church have frayed. 

Peter Berger has written a fascinating perspective on the current German political leaders, both of whom grew up in a Lutheran parsonage.  He writes of the impact of that childhood and the fruit it bore in their lives and their take on the state and future of the German republic.  You can read it all here.

I have quoted what I consider to be a significant point from the article.  The words are not hollow but ring true with my own personal experience.  The tired old Proverb "train up a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it" is here given its proper context and meaning.  The conditions under which we live our formative years are not without consequence in our later life.  For ill as well as good. 

Read this line again:  The powerful language of Luther’s German translation of the Bible and the powerful music of Lutheran hymnody must inevitably reverberate even in the consciousness of individuals whose ties with the Lutheran church have frayed.

This is exactly the point at which I have grave questions about those who abandon historic liturgy and hymnody.  When we replace the powerful words that are, essentially, sung Scripture, with contemporary worship and music, we leave our children without that benefit and blessing that will prove to be the solid foundation to which they can ever return when they wander (as so often they will).  When we raise our children without the catechism and its vivid language that expresses the Biblical faith, when we send them to Church on Sunday morning to a free for all of modern music that has a good beat and you can dance to it but does not deeply and fully communicate the evangelical and catholic faith, and when we leave them with a liturgy of the moment created for the here and now without being connected to the way Christians have believed and taught and worshiped since Christ, we hinder their future and give them little to return to when they wander but a forgotten feeling.