I grew up in Lutheran formalism--that's all I knew until my late teens. But underneath it all was an emerging modern interest in new approaches to our religion. I think there was always an interest to become more relevant in an age when new political winds were blowing, and old forms of religion just didn't seem to be touching bases with it.
The thing is, traditional liturgical churches are growing. The Orthodox Church is growing, with the exception of the ethnocentric Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, which suffers from a number of problems. Indeed membership in the Coptic, Syriac and Antiochian Orthodox Church is exploding, and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church in America and ROCOR all receive large numbers of converts, in addition to “cradle Orthodox” who are born into the church, who might be second or third generation converts or they might be members of traditionally Orthodox ethnic groups.
In Roman Catholicism, the Traditional Latin Masses were experiencing continual growth, both in terms of people choosing to attend the TLM, and also in terms of baptisms, while the more modern “Ordinary Form” of the mass has seen a steady decline in attendance.
In Lutheranism, confessional Lutheran churches like the LCMS, WELS, ELDONA and so on, and likewise in Anglicanism, the conservative jurisdictions such as ACNA and the Continuing Anglican churches, have not experienced the same catastrophic collapse in church membership as the liberal mainline ELCA and the Episcopal Church (which amusingly are in full communion, but it is not helping them).
Meanwhile, aliturgical evangelical churches, even the mighty Southern Baptist Convention, are stagnating in terms of membership, and the same is true of aliturgical non-denominationalist churches and fundamentalist churches and other non-traditional denominations, with the exception of Pentecostalism.
I suspect the reason why growth seems limited to the traditional churches and to the Pentecostal churches is because people want to experience mystery in their religion: they seek an encounter with the divine, and the watered down liturgies of the liberal mainline churches, which increasingly seem to be more about confessing a gospel of social justice and climate action rather than the Gospel of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ handed down from the Apostles, and likewise the highly intellectualized worship of those churches that stress the sermon over the sacraments and adopt a hard cessationist position, or which embrace the doctrinally vacuous rock music over the traditional hymns and the ancient canticles and Psalms of Christianity, which allow for worship to be done decently and in order, are losing their grasp, which seemed dominant and unstoppable until recently, for it seemed a truism that as the liberal mainline churches contracted, the aliturgical evangelical and fundamentalist churches would expand.
What motivates Pentecostals is the same thing as what motivates other traditional liturgical Christians, that being a desire to engage in the worship of the Apostolic Church; the tragedy is that the Pentecostals are unaware that what they are doing is not actually what the early church was like in terms of its worship and in terms of the charisms which are granted, which we can reconstruct from ancient liturgical manuscripts (for example, the second century Strasbourg Papyrus, which documents a liturgy which is traditionally dated to the first century, attributed to St. Mark the Evangelist, and which remains in regular use by the Coptic Orthodox Church even in the present). And in terms of the charisms, the experience of the Fathers suggests that these are not consistent with the Pentecostal experience, particularly not speaking in tongues without a translator, and there is a strong implication that that charism consists of speaking in a real language or being able to communicate without recourse to language, for the purpose of communicating the faith.
Likewise, I understand why snake holding Pentecostals do that, but it is an erroneous reading of a part of the Gospel of Mark whose authenticity is debated, so even if the longer ending of Mark is authentic (and I suspect it is, but it is noteworthy that it is missing from the oldest manuscripts), it is a misunderstanding.
Nonetheless, the fact they are growing and we are growing points to people having the desire for an authentic experience of the worship of the early church, and not the vacuous rock music or praise and worship music dominated services of the non-denominational churches, or the extreme liberalism of the mainline churches, which clearly contradicts scripture, for example, with regards to their willingness to ordain sodomites and to even wed them, which many traditional Christians regard as an offense against the sacrament of Holy Matrimony which makes a mockery of the teaching of both the Old and New Testaments concerning human sexual morality.
