Thank you, Steve, for another thought provoking piece. Apologetics has always been difficult to understand for me. This has helped me greatly. As a convert to Orthodoxy, there is so much to learn and unlearn from past experiences….i am 76 years old and continue to be hungry for knowledge of God and His Holy Church. I pray I will KNOW HIM, in HIS energies more and more each day. Our priest uses your Be the Bee series often in sermons and teachings. You are a blessing!
This one really resonated with me and gave me some needed clarity on a few thoughts I’ve been wrestling with as our parish goes through a strategic planning process. Thanks Steve!
Of course, forgive me as I’m not a great writer but I’ll try to give you an adequate picture here. I’m sure you are familiar with Bill Marianne’s and his Stewardship Calling work, our parish (Holy Trinity in Indianapolis) is in the implementation phase of that process. I serve on the committee for liturgical engagement and education as a part of that process as well as on our parish council and as a Sunday school teacher for our 9th and 10th graders. Over this past summer we adopted a new church school curriculum and it fell a little flat to be honest. Never the less we’ve kept pushing forward pivoting as needed in each class. We are now working on the liturgical engagement piece for adults as well as our youth and as we have been generating ideas they’ve all seemed a little shallow. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, they were good ideas, all things I’d be interested in participating or having my kids participate in, but something just wasn’t sitting right.
All the while I’ve been on my own personal journey of really trying to live out the faith, of encountering Christ in my everyday, becoming the man God intended me to be for myself, for my wife, for my children, for my community. Really trying to “walk the steps” and I would now say pursue the dogmatic consciousness. After reading your essay it all kind of clicked and I was actually reminded of some of your Effective Christian Ministry content from over the years. I went back and reviewed the articles and videos I had booked marked over the years and I began to understand why I was having this feeling off shallowness when it came to our planning. We’ve inadvertently flattened out Christ in our quest to retain and regain our youth and young adults. We’ve focused our attention on getting people in the pews, increasing stewardship, adding more ministries and programs. None of which are bad in of themselves, but we’ve left out the very thing we are meant to do, encounter and know the living God. As you put it in one of your earlier essays “what if the end of ministry is to encounter Christ, embody His Church and engage the world in His name?”
I could go on, but the point is this particular essay really helped tie together a lot of the thoughts I’ve been wrestling with in my head from not only your previous essays, but all the other books, scriptures, content and conversations I’ve been consuming on the path to dogmatic consciousness.
Thank you for this! I was reading Fr. Matthew the Poor last night, and this caught me particularly:
“Indeed, welcome to Christianity. Perplexity! You see, the rules of this world are governed by human logic. One plus one makes two. Play the market right and you’ll be a success. Study hard and you’ll pass. But the rules of the spirit are not decided by human logic. One plus one can make just one again; and a thousand years are as brief as yesterday. Everything is flipped upside-down in spiritual life. You must know well that the ministry of the Spirit is not subject to human logic. Don’t ever try to interpret it so.”
I appreciate the challenge(s) of your essays! Keep them coming.
Steven, you illustrate the problem with your criteria here. You imply in your article that you are the kind of teacher we should listen to because "I was called (or, at the very least, appointed) to do important work: to teach and preach and support the work of ministry in communities across the Church." Yet, here you refer to someone as "grace-filled" who was not even Orthodox. Did you study ecclesiology in seminary?
Matthew the Poor was not part of the Orthodox Church but was a Coptic monk. You said he was "grace-filled". The Holy Spirit is everywhere present and fillest all things, but the Holy Spirit only enters the heart of a person unto purification and illumination through the Mysteries of the one Church, the Orthodox Church. I understand there are a lot of participants in the Ecumenical Movement who want to claim that the Copts are Orthodox but none of our saints, Fathers, and holy elders have considered the Copts to be part of the Church with grace-filled Mysteries. A person cannot become grace-filled without the grace-filled Mysteries of the one Church which is the body of Christ.
Fr. Matthew had some good teachings but it was because he relied upon the writings of Greek and Russian Orthodox or saints and Fathers, and on an anthology on prayer by Fr. Lazarus Moore which had quotes from St. Theophan the Recluse and other "Chalcedonian" Orthodox saints who were not in communion with the Copts. These writings led him to a belief in theosis, though Pope Shenouda III and most Copts have rejected the teaching on theosis.
While someone outside of the Orthodox Church who reads Orthodox writings and tries to live by them may be able to write some good things which reflect what they have read, it is better to recommend that Orthodox Christians read the Orthodox saints and Fathers directly rather than through the second hand writings of a non-Orthodox person.
He was a member of the Church of the East. And yet, we not only read his writings, we venerate him as a saint.
An exception, to be sure. But the Holy Spirit blows where He will. And that can be surprising and challenging for us.
(And I'm not equated St Isaac and Matthew the Poor. I'm simply suggesting that your words would have us remove St Isaac from the calendar.)
At the very least, we can "be the bee" and profit from grace when we encounter it (while leaving the unprofitable things behind).
There seems to be profit in Matthew the Poor's words. If he relied upon saints and Fathers, how is he different from any other sound teacher? His name has come up enough that I'm going to get to know him.
That is up to you if you want to read Matthew the Poor. The danger, of course, is the temptation to believe that the Orthodox Church is not the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church because someone outside of the Orthodox Church writes Orthodox things after studying Orthodox writings. Also, there may be a bit of falsehood mixed in with the truth and not everyone has the discernment to know the difference, so it is safer to read the writings of Orthodox saints, Fathers, and elders which are available in abundance.
St. Isaac the Syrian was fully Orthodox. This issue is dealt with in the Introduction to his Homilies in the 2011 edition published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery where it was concluded that "the Church of Persia to which Saint Isaac belonged was neither heretical in theology nor schismatic in confession." (p.75)
In the life of St. Paisios the Athonite by the Hesychasterion "Evangelist John the Theologian", we find the following story regarding the Orthodoxy of St. Isaac:
"On another occasion, a theologian, who had studied in France, insisted that Abba Isaac was not Orthodox because he had served as a bishop in a Nestorian atmosphere. Father Paisios tried to help him understand that Abba Isaac is at the very heart of Orthodoxy, but could not convince him, something which grieved him a great deal. 'I felt such immense pain;' he said, 'had anyone struck me on the head with a hatchet, I would not have felt the pain I had felt over that. Afterwards, an incident took place. Those incidents are why I have said that if one is deeply hurt over something, God will then inform him; pain forms the basis for God's intervention. If the heart is in a lot of pain, God will provide precise information.'
"God had indeed precisely informed Father Paisios about that particular matter. In a vision, he saw hierarchs passing by before him; among them was also Abba Isaac, who turned towards him and said, 'Yes, I lived in a Nestorian atmosphere; there were heretics in my province, but I was Orthodox, and I opposed them.' Afterwards, the Saint emphatically proclaimed, 'Abba Isaac was an Orthodox Christian to the core!' He even explained how Westerners had slandered Abba Isaac as not being Orthodox because he had cultivated hesychasm. That incident was why Father Paisios referred to him as 'the wronged Saint'. And in the Menaion, in the Synaxarion for January 28, where the feast day of Saint Ephraim the Syrian is listed, he had added, 'And Isaac the great Hesychast and much-wronged Saint.'" (pp.373-374)
This is really well done Steve. Thank you for writing and sharing. I’m not very active on Facebook and see things very intermittently, but I’m very glad that I saw and read this. Hope all is well with you.
Thank you for this article, Br. Steve. This is a reminder for me to deliberate repentance, and at the same time you have outlined the three basic steps for internet apologetics. Great job bringing Tolkien's reference into the essay.
Thanks, Father. I hope those three safeguards can help lead us aware from apologetics (defending the faith against outside forces) and to repentance (acknowledging our own failings and missteps).
I have agree with your article but I'm frustrated. I think this issue wouldn't have occurred if 40 years ago an article went out about how the Orthodox Church should evangelize.
So instead for many of us the only resources we have are online.
I think you're right in that this (well intentioned) move into online spaces happened to address a gap in leadership and vision on the part of the institutional Church.
Forget a how-do manual about how to evangelize. I wonder how many Orthodox Christians thought we should be evangelizing to begin with!
I respect your opinion Steve, I believe that you mean what you are saying. It's true that the ascetical life is the most important for all of us. I want to point out however that if it wasn't for the work of apolagetics that many people have been doing online, a good portion of us young people would have never become Orthodox in the first place. The old boomer mentality quite clearly hasn't been as effective at realizing our great commission as have been people like Jay Dyer. It's also somewhat uncharitable to assume that the people you are referring to aren't themselves practicing a spiritual life. Saint Gregory Palamas himself is of course famous for his apolagetic work defending the faith. 15 years sounds like some arbitrary gatekeeping to me.
Saint Ambrose was a catechumen when he was chosen to be Bishop. Saint Agustine wrote multiple books on the faith before baptism even. Saint Benedict in his rule told the elders to listen to the young because the prophets Samuel and Daniel were chosen to by God to judge the priests while being but children. Obviously these are exceptions and we have to recognize the Holy Spirit working through our elders and clergy but some people are called to special purposes.
Please forgive me if this turned into a rant. I feel like you are sort of a bridge between the old boomer ways and the sort of interdoxy sphere that you are talking about. Best of both worlds maybe? A lot of your content was very helpful to me early on. God bless you and your ministry.
You're quite right in critiquing the institutional Church for its failure to reach out to people. But I'd be careful we don't swing in the opposite direction and go full para-church (which is what a lot of the online stuff seems to be flirting with).
Saint Ambrose, for example, didn't just start a YouTube channel. He was ordained to be a bishop. He didn't just appoint himself to preach and teach.
Saint Gregory Palamas spent years in ascetic struggle. His writing was grounded in spiritual experience (which takes time). And he was eventually ordained to be a bishop himself. Again, he didn't just appoint himself to preach and teach.
That temptation to parachurch structures is what the three safeguards I mentioned (canonical regularity, acceptability, formational preparation) are designed to mitigate against. While I wish the institutional Church was better at engaging people, we can't just bypass those canonical structures (no matter how good our intentions may be).
I'm actually going to write a piece (in the next week or two) against my general discomfort with the internet as a means of preaching--and why I stepped back from the internet. I only stepped forward again (in a very limited way, with this blog) because of my position with an Affiliate Ministry of the Assembly of Bishops.
I appreciate your measured and thoughtful comments. Good strength with what's left of the Fast!
This is a big topic and it is true that there seem to be many self-appointed "apologists" who do not have the spiritual experience necessary to acquire a dogmatic consciousness of which St. Silouan speaks. Met Hierotheos of Nafpaktos says in his book on St. Sophrony of Essex, St. Silouan's disciple, that according to St. Sophrony "usually more than twenty years are required from the time when [a man is] baptised as an Orthodox Christian, under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father, before we are certain that he has learnt to live in an Orthodox way and Orthodox dogma has become his way of life." (I Know a Man in Christ, p. 150). Most people do not even have an experienced spiritual father to guide them, and of those who do, how many are obedient to the guidance they are given?
While there are problems with self-appointed internet apologists, your criteria of canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation are not the best criteria for discerning between true and false teachers. We have a lot of patristic literature on how to discern between true and false teachers. The laity are "rational sheep" and are responsible for reading the saints and the Fathers of the Church in order to know the Faith, and we are to follow only those teachers on earth who themselves faithfully follow the teachings of the saints and Fathers who were illumined by the Holy Spirit. If priests and bishops teach things which are contrary to the teachings of the saints and Fathers, we are not to follow such teachings even if they are uttered by a patriarch or all of the patriarchs together, regardless of their "canonical" and other credentials.
Historically, there have been many heretics and spiritually damaging teachers who fit the criteria of "canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation," depending on how "formative preparation" is defined. Having a bishop to whom you are accountable is meaningless if the bishop is not actually holding those under them accountable for faithfully teaching that which is in agreement with the saints and Fathers. When St. Silouan and St. Sophrony speak of the preconditions for acquiring a dogmatic consciousness, "formative preparation" for them is also not likely what many people today have in mind as almost exclusively referring to some kind of seminary training.
Again, this is a big topic and you are right that there are concerns with self-appointed internet apologists, but it is important to use patristic criteria in evaluating such things.
Fair point. Though, unfortunately, many of the people drawn to online figures are not Orthodox Christians firmly grounded in the Church. On the internet (free from any canonical regularity or accountability), it seems like people develop a reputation for "Orthodox" preaching from people who don't know what Orthodox preaching is.
You raise interesting questions about the episcopacy. No bishop is unaccountable, so any hierarch who veers from the faith should receive some correction from his synod and brother hierarchs. As I presume you're a fellow layperson, that's above our respective pay grades. So we can focus on canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation.
Also, does "formative preparation" include more than a seminary degree? Absolutely. But that's why I mentioned that preparation happens in a community where ones spiritual state can be properly understood and vetted before one is called to service.
Testimony (which is what you seem to be describing) is different than apology. And preferable, given our cultural context. Sharing joyful stories of what God has done in our lives is far more engaging than the tedious, self-indulgent debates that dominate internet apologetics.
When Saint Paul writes that "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise" (1 Corinthians 1:27) he's contrasting the "wisdom" of the world--which is folly--with the true Wisdom of the Logos--which seems like folly to the world.
Certainly, the Lord can use internet nonsense to lead people into the Church, but that doesn't make it any less nonsense. Internet apologists seem to fight the folly of the world with their own chosen folly. The Wisdom of the Logos remains absent, I fear.
And yes, the institutional Church can do much, much more to preach the Gospel to the nations.
Thank you, Steve, for another thought provoking piece. Apologetics has always been difficult to understand for me. This has helped me greatly. As a convert to Orthodoxy, there is so much to learn and unlearn from past experiences….i am 76 years old and continue to be hungry for knowledge of God and His Holy Church. I pray I will KNOW HIM, in HIS energies more and more each day. Our priest uses your Be the Bee series often in sermons and teachings. You are a blessing!
This one really resonated with me and gave me some needed clarity on a few thoughts I’ve been wrestling with as our parish goes through a strategic planning process. Thanks Steve!
Happy to hear that, Grant.
I'd love to hear how this ties in with that process, if you'd be willing to share.
Of course, forgive me as I’m not a great writer but I’ll try to give you an adequate picture here. I’m sure you are familiar with Bill Marianne’s and his Stewardship Calling work, our parish (Holy Trinity in Indianapolis) is in the implementation phase of that process. I serve on the committee for liturgical engagement and education as a part of that process as well as on our parish council and as a Sunday school teacher for our 9th and 10th graders. Over this past summer we adopted a new church school curriculum and it fell a little flat to be honest. Never the less we’ve kept pushing forward pivoting as needed in each class. We are now working on the liturgical engagement piece for adults as well as our youth and as we have been generating ideas they’ve all seemed a little shallow. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, they were good ideas, all things I’d be interested in participating or having my kids participate in, but something just wasn’t sitting right.
All the while I’ve been on my own personal journey of really trying to live out the faith, of encountering Christ in my everyday, becoming the man God intended me to be for myself, for my wife, for my children, for my community. Really trying to “walk the steps” and I would now say pursue the dogmatic consciousness. After reading your essay it all kind of clicked and I was actually reminded of some of your Effective Christian Ministry content from over the years. I went back and reviewed the articles and videos I had booked marked over the years and I began to understand why I was having this feeling off shallowness when it came to our planning. We’ve inadvertently flattened out Christ in our quest to retain and regain our youth and young adults. We’ve focused our attention on getting people in the pews, increasing stewardship, adding more ministries and programs. None of which are bad in of themselves, but we’ve left out the very thing we are meant to do, encounter and know the living God. As you put it in one of your earlier essays “what if the end of ministry is to encounter Christ, embody His Church and engage the world in His name?”
I could go on, but the point is this particular essay really helped tie together a lot of the thoughts I’ve been wrestling with in my head from not only your previous essays, but all the other books, scriptures, content and conversations I’ve been consuming on the path to dogmatic consciousness.
Thanks for this! I appreciate the honest insight.
For what it's worth, I've heard from a few parishes that have used the 5 Needs of ECM as a framework for their parish strategic plan.
I'm glad your thoughts are coming together.
Thank you for this! I was reading Fr. Matthew the Poor last night, and this caught me particularly:
“Indeed, welcome to Christianity. Perplexity! You see, the rules of this world are governed by human logic. One plus one makes two. Play the market right and you’ll be a success. Study hard and you’ll pass. But the rules of the spirit are not decided by human logic. One plus one can make just one again; and a thousand years are as brief as yesterday. Everything is flipped upside-down in spiritual life. You must know well that the ministry of the Spirit is not subject to human logic. Don’t ever try to interpret it so.”
I appreciate the challenge(s) of your essays! Keep them coming.
Thank you for mentioning Matthew the Poor! He keeps being recommended to me. I think he's another grace-filled person I need to get to know.
This is in “Words For Our Lives”. So far, it has been worth reading!
It's on my desk! I hope to get to it later in Lent.
Steven, you illustrate the problem with your criteria here. You imply in your article that you are the kind of teacher we should listen to because "I was called (or, at the very least, appointed) to do important work: to teach and preach and support the work of ministry in communities across the Church." Yet, here you refer to someone as "grace-filled" who was not even Orthodox. Did you study ecclesiology in seminary?
I did study ecclesiology. Why would it be a problem to recognize some measure of grace in a figure like Matthew the Poor?
Matthew the Poor was not part of the Orthodox Church but was a Coptic monk. You said he was "grace-filled". The Holy Spirit is everywhere present and fillest all things, but the Holy Spirit only enters the heart of a person unto purification and illumination through the Mysteries of the one Church, the Orthodox Church. I understand there are a lot of participants in the Ecumenical Movement who want to claim that the Copts are Orthodox but none of our saints, Fathers, and holy elders have considered the Copts to be part of the Church with grace-filled Mysteries. A person cannot become grace-filled without the grace-filled Mysteries of the one Church which is the body of Christ.
Fr. Matthew had some good teachings but it was because he relied upon the writings of Greek and Russian Orthodox or saints and Fathers, and on an anthology on prayer by Fr. Lazarus Moore which had quotes from St. Theophan the Recluse and other "Chalcedonian" Orthodox saints who were not in communion with the Copts. These writings led him to a belief in theosis, though Pope Shenouda III and most Copts have rejected the teaching on theosis.
While someone outside of the Orthodox Church who reads Orthodox writings and tries to live by them may be able to write some good things which reflect what they have read, it is better to recommend that Orthodox Christians read the Orthodox saints and Fathers directly rather than through the second hand writings of a non-Orthodox person.
You're familiar with St Isaac the Syrian?
He was a member of the Church of the East. And yet, we not only read his writings, we venerate him as a saint.
An exception, to be sure. But the Holy Spirit blows where He will. And that can be surprising and challenging for us.
(And I'm not equated St Isaac and Matthew the Poor. I'm simply suggesting that your words would have us remove St Isaac from the calendar.)
At the very least, we can "be the bee" and profit from grace when we encounter it (while leaving the unprofitable things behind).
There seems to be profit in Matthew the Poor's words. If he relied upon saints and Fathers, how is he different from any other sound teacher? His name has come up enough that I'm going to get to know him.
That is up to you if you want to read Matthew the Poor. The danger, of course, is the temptation to believe that the Orthodox Church is not the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church because someone outside of the Orthodox Church writes Orthodox things after studying Orthodox writings. Also, there may be a bit of falsehood mixed in with the truth and not everyone has the discernment to know the difference, so it is safer to read the writings of Orthodox saints, Fathers, and elders which are available in abundance.
St. Isaac the Syrian was fully Orthodox. This issue is dealt with in the Introduction to his Homilies in the 2011 edition published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery where it was concluded that "the Church of Persia to which Saint Isaac belonged was neither heretical in theology nor schismatic in confession." (p.75)
In the life of St. Paisios the Athonite by the Hesychasterion "Evangelist John the Theologian", we find the following story regarding the Orthodoxy of St. Isaac:
"On another occasion, a theologian, who had studied in France, insisted that Abba Isaac was not Orthodox because he had served as a bishop in a Nestorian atmosphere. Father Paisios tried to help him understand that Abba Isaac is at the very heart of Orthodoxy, but could not convince him, something which grieved him a great deal. 'I felt such immense pain;' he said, 'had anyone struck me on the head with a hatchet, I would not have felt the pain I had felt over that. Afterwards, an incident took place. Those incidents are why I have said that if one is deeply hurt over something, God will then inform him; pain forms the basis for God's intervention. If the heart is in a lot of pain, God will provide precise information.'
"God had indeed precisely informed Father Paisios about that particular matter. In a vision, he saw hierarchs passing by before him; among them was also Abba Isaac, who turned towards him and said, 'Yes, I lived in a Nestorian atmosphere; there were heretics in my province, but I was Orthodox, and I opposed them.' Afterwards, the Saint emphatically proclaimed, 'Abba Isaac was an Orthodox Christian to the core!' He even explained how Westerners had slandered Abba Isaac as not being Orthodox because he had cultivated hesychasm. That incident was why Father Paisios referred to him as 'the wronged Saint'. And in the Menaion, in the Synaxarion for January 28, where the feast day of Saint Ephraim the Syrian is listed, he had added, 'And Isaac the great Hesychast and much-wronged Saint.'" (pp.373-374)
This is really well done Steve. Thank you for writing and sharing. I’m not very active on Facebook and see things very intermittently, but I’m very glad that I saw and read this. Hope all is well with you.
Thank God, all's well. I'm glad you stumbled across the piece (and that it was a helpful read).
Absolutely vital. Incredible article. And timely!
Glory to God!
Thank you for this article, Br. Steve. This is a reminder for me to deliberate repentance, and at the same time you have outlined the three basic steps for internet apologetics. Great job bringing Tolkien's reference into the essay.
Thanks, Father. I hope those three safeguards can help lead us aware from apologetics (defending the faith against outside forces) and to repentance (acknowledging our own failings and missteps).
I have agree with your article but I'm frustrated. I think this issue wouldn't have occurred if 40 years ago an article went out about how the Orthodox Church should evangelize.
So instead for many of us the only resources we have are online.
I think you're right in that this (well intentioned) move into online spaces happened to address a gap in leadership and vision on the part of the institutional Church.
Forget a how-do manual about how to evangelize. I wonder how many Orthodox Christians thought we should be evangelizing to begin with!
I share the frustration.
I respect your opinion Steve, I believe that you mean what you are saying. It's true that the ascetical life is the most important for all of us. I want to point out however that if it wasn't for the work of apolagetics that many people have been doing online, a good portion of us young people would have never become Orthodox in the first place. The old boomer mentality quite clearly hasn't been as effective at realizing our great commission as have been people like Jay Dyer. It's also somewhat uncharitable to assume that the people you are referring to aren't themselves practicing a spiritual life. Saint Gregory Palamas himself is of course famous for his apolagetic work defending the faith. 15 years sounds like some arbitrary gatekeeping to me.
Saint Ambrose was a catechumen when he was chosen to be Bishop. Saint Agustine wrote multiple books on the faith before baptism even. Saint Benedict in his rule told the elders to listen to the young because the prophets Samuel and Daniel were chosen to by God to judge the priests while being but children. Obviously these are exceptions and we have to recognize the Holy Spirit working through our elders and clergy but some people are called to special purposes.
Please forgive me if this turned into a rant. I feel like you are sort of a bridge between the old boomer ways and the sort of interdoxy sphere that you are talking about. Best of both worlds maybe? A lot of your content was very helpful to me early on. God bless you and your ministry.
You're quite right in critiquing the institutional Church for its failure to reach out to people. But I'd be careful we don't swing in the opposite direction and go full para-church (which is what a lot of the online stuff seems to be flirting with).
Saint Ambrose, for example, didn't just start a YouTube channel. He was ordained to be a bishop. He didn't just appoint himself to preach and teach.
Saint Gregory Palamas spent years in ascetic struggle. His writing was grounded in spiritual experience (which takes time). And he was eventually ordained to be a bishop himself. Again, he didn't just appoint himself to preach and teach.
That temptation to parachurch structures is what the three safeguards I mentioned (canonical regularity, acceptability, formational preparation) are designed to mitigate against. While I wish the institutional Church was better at engaging people, we can't just bypass those canonical structures (no matter how good our intentions may be).
I'm actually going to write a piece (in the next week or two) against my general discomfort with the internet as a means of preaching--and why I stepped back from the internet. I only stepped forward again (in a very limited way, with this blog) because of my position with an Affiliate Ministry of the Assembly of Bishops.
I appreciate your measured and thoughtful comments. Good strength with what's left of the Fast!
This is a big topic and it is true that there seem to be many self-appointed "apologists" who do not have the spiritual experience necessary to acquire a dogmatic consciousness of which St. Silouan speaks. Met Hierotheos of Nafpaktos says in his book on St. Sophrony of Essex, St. Silouan's disciple, that according to St. Sophrony "usually more than twenty years are required from the time when [a man is] baptised as an Orthodox Christian, under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father, before we are certain that he has learnt to live in an Orthodox way and Orthodox dogma has become his way of life." (I Know a Man in Christ, p. 150). Most people do not even have an experienced spiritual father to guide them, and of those who do, how many are obedient to the guidance they are given?
While there are problems with self-appointed internet apologists, your criteria of canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation are not the best criteria for discerning between true and false teachers. We have a lot of patristic literature on how to discern between true and false teachers. The laity are "rational sheep" and are responsible for reading the saints and the Fathers of the Church in order to know the Faith, and we are to follow only those teachers on earth who themselves faithfully follow the teachings of the saints and Fathers who were illumined by the Holy Spirit. If priests and bishops teach things which are contrary to the teachings of the saints and Fathers, we are not to follow such teachings even if they are uttered by a patriarch or all of the patriarchs together, regardless of their "canonical" and other credentials.
Historically, there have been many heretics and spiritually damaging teachers who fit the criteria of "canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation," depending on how "formative preparation" is defined. Having a bishop to whom you are accountable is meaningless if the bishop is not actually holding those under them accountable for faithfully teaching that which is in agreement with the saints and Fathers. When St. Silouan and St. Sophrony speak of the preconditions for acquiring a dogmatic consciousness, "formative preparation" for them is also not likely what many people today have in mind as almost exclusively referring to some kind of seminary training.
Again, this is a big topic and you are right that there are concerns with self-appointed internet apologists, but it is important to use patristic criteria in evaluating such things.
Fair point. Though, unfortunately, many of the people drawn to online figures are not Orthodox Christians firmly grounded in the Church. On the internet (free from any canonical regularity or accountability), it seems like people develop a reputation for "Orthodox" preaching from people who don't know what Orthodox preaching is.
You raise interesting questions about the episcopacy. No bishop is unaccountable, so any hierarch who veers from the faith should receive some correction from his synod and brother hierarchs. As I presume you're a fellow layperson, that's above our respective pay grades. So we can focus on canonical regularity, accountability, and formative preparation.
Also, does "formative preparation" include more than a seminary degree? Absolutely. But that's why I mentioned that preparation happens in a community where ones spiritual state can be properly understood and vetted before one is called to service.
Testimony (which is what you seem to be describing) is different than apology. And preferable, given our cultural context. Sharing joyful stories of what God has done in our lives is far more engaging than the tedious, self-indulgent debates that dominate internet apologetics.
When Saint Paul writes that "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise" (1 Corinthians 1:27) he's contrasting the "wisdom" of the world--which is folly--with the true Wisdom of the Logos--which seems like folly to the world.
Certainly, the Lord can use internet nonsense to lead people into the Church, but that doesn't make it any less nonsense. Internet apologists seem to fight the folly of the world with their own chosen folly. The Wisdom of the Logos remains absent, I fear.
And yes, the institutional Church can do much, much more to preach the Gospel to the nations.