Listened to the debate and Michael's post-debate talk. I think most of Michael's frustration was more than justified. Dr. Bob did not stay on the topic and did not really engage Michael's points, just play typical fallacious word games. It was quite funny hearing him heavily citing Schaff, a guy who doesn't believe the same things as Dr. Bob to begin with, and coming in with canned speeches and a dishonest agenda.
Of course, on the most fundamental and essential questions - such as "where was the debate and outrage over the supposed transformation of the priesthood in the first 1500 years of the Church? And what Church Father spoke out against it?" - Dr. Bob answered with evasion and obfuscation because there simply is no explanation, unless you're going to go with the Pastor Jim vs. Emperor Constantine And His Goons fundy mythology, which only the absolutely most historically illiterate types will embrace.
Look, before I was Orthodox, I was deep into pentecostal-influenced evangelicalism for at least a decade. This form of Christianity can seem like it's thriving because you have all these gigachurches with huge congregations and practically their own in-house media empires, but it's mostly an illusion. For starters, most of the congregants joined these churches from other Christian traditions, usually some form of southern baptist church. This form of Christianity is largely trend-based and heavily reliant on co-opting secular musical styles and entertainment, even graphic design, to draw in crowds. The result is a flashy product that creates a dopamine high to draw you in, but won't help you cultivate a deep and substantive faith. I was a part of these churches for years and years and the spectacle only helped to distract from my interior spiritual destitution that their model completely brushes over. There is no incentive for discipleship or Christian growth, though they will give lip service to these things; the incentive is on an immediate return, like trying to some $900 sneakers to a streetwear enthusiast that will fall apart or be worthless in a few years.
I am not impressed by the growth of evangelicostalism in places like Brazil. They are just 15-20 years behind what's happened in the US, Australia, and Europe, and the outcome will be the same eventually. It is an attraction to superficial trends and novelty propelling it: back when I listened to contemporary worship music, every video on YouTube by Hillsong or Bethel would have dozens of comments from Brazilian or other Latin American kids drawn to it because they thought it sounded cool, being unfamiliar with bands like U2 or Bloc Party whose styles were being ripped off. My wife and her family come from a Brazilian evangelical background and always talk about how great their church was... 25-30 years ago, which of course is long gone.
These congregations produce one of two common outcomes: either you stay a true believer and end up basically a Christian version of a highly-feminized hippie, or you leave Christianity. I was involved for years at a seemingly conservative evangelicostal church, and most of the people I knew from my "house church" have either totally left Christianity or at least wholeheartedly embraced wokeness and the globohomo narrative. Almost none of them attend that church anymore. A smaller group will leave for other types of Christian traditions: initially Calvinism (the origin of the "Young, Restless, and Reformed" movement of Baptists embracing Calvinist literature and soteriology without Calvin's church structure and sacraments.) But nowadays, the YRR movement has largely run out of steam (in part due to the nearly cartoonish collapse of its former superstars like Mark Driscoll) and more are heading toward Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
Evangelicostal gigachurches, megachurches, and mediumchurches are rapidly hurtling toward the cultural narrative and have no epistemic grounding as long as you can marshal Bible verses to support whatever position you're advocating. They rest on a theological foundation of sand, and it's bad news for the still many well-intentioned believers huddled within the bare walls of their shopping-mall-and-industrial-warehouse buildings. Many conservative evangelicals are freaking out over the state of things, and this creates for the Orthodox a prime opportunity to show them an alternative to the pervasive instability of the protestant tradition. That's why these debates, articles, videos, and so on from the so-called Orthosphere are important - there are many Christians out there whose entire belief is precarious in the wake of the ongoing evangelical collapse. These people have never been more open to hearing about the fullness of the Christian faith, and the firm patristic grounding of Orthodox Christian theology that is not blown about by the cultural winds. It very well might be the difference between salvation and abandoning God entirely.
In the grand scheme Orthodoxy is still small in the West, but there is good reason to believe that we may be seeing that change. My parish has a handful of new people, often quite enthusiastic, showing up every single week, eager to learn more about Orthodoxy.