Contemporary Debates in the Russian Church

Beneath the institutional confidence of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church run a set of unresolved internal debates: whether and how to make the liturgy more comprehensible without abandoning Church Slavonic; how to close the gap between the vast number of Russians who identify as Orthodox and the small number who practice; whether the rapid reopening of monasteries has produced spiritual depth or only buildings; how to reform theological education; and how to hold together a worldwide flock after 2022. This file surveys these debates with polling data and documented cases, current as of 2026.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Liturgical Language: Church Slavonic versus Russian

The language of worship is among the oldest and most sensitive questions in the Russian Church. The services are celebrated in Church Slavonic — a sacral, archaic idiom comprehensible in outline but often opaque in detail to modern worshippers. Whether to revise or partly replace it has been debated for over a century.

The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918 took up the question. Its liturgical sub-commission affirmed Church Slavonic as the primary liturgical language while proposing that Russian (and Ukrainian) be permitted in individual parishes with church approval, alongside some simplification of the Slavonic itself. These were draft recommendations, never finally promulgated: the Revolution and Civil War cut the Council short (Destivelle, The Moscow Council [1917–1918], 2015).

In the 1920s the state-backed Renovationist schism (the “Living Church,” founded 1922) made vernacular Russian one of its banners; Metropolitan Antonin (Granovsky) produced one of the first Russian translations of the Divine Liturgy in 1923. Because Renovationism was both schismatic and a tool of Soviet pressure, the association of Russian-language worship with it has cast a long shadow, supplying later traditionalists with a ready argument against vernacular reform (Roslof, Red Priests, 2002).

Under Patriarch Kirill the question returned. The Inter-Council Presence (Mezhsobornoe prisutstvie) prepared a draft document, “Church Slavonic Language in the Life of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 21st Century,” published for church-wide discussion on June 15, 2011. It affirmed Church Slavonic as primary and rejected wholesale translation into Russian, proposing only limited revision within Slavonic — replacing words that had become incomprehensible or misleading. Even this modest proposal drew a fierce traditionalist backlash invoking the spectre of the Old Believer schism; Archpriest Sergiy Pravdolyubov, for instance, demanded in August 2011 that it be “withdrawn from consideration.” The document was effectively shelved, though no formal decree rescinded it (text at patriarchia.ru; analysis by Nun Cornelia [Rees], OrthoChristian, July 1, 2011; Pravdolyubov at blagogon.ru, August 2011).

The most prominent practitioner of Russian-language worship within the canonical Church is Archpriest Georgy Kochetkov, founder of the Transfiguration (Preobrazhenskoe) Brotherhood and St. Philaret’s Institute, whose Moscow community has long used Russian translations. His ministry has been controversial: after a violent confrontation at his parish in June 1997 — its causes disputed between the patriarchate and the Brotherhood — Patriarch Alexei II suspended him from October 1997, lifting the ban in 2000 (Kochetkov materials at psmb.ru; Confronti, April 2022). The episode illustrates how quickly the language question becomes a proxy for deeper disputes over the shape of parish life.

Catechesis and the “In-Churching” Problem

The Russian Church’s central pastoral problem is the gulf between Orthodox identification and Orthodox practice — what Russian churchmen call votserkovlenie, “in-churching,” the actual integration of the nominally Orthodox into the life of the Church.

The Pew Research Center, in its 2017 study Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe (fieldwork 2015), found that in Russia:

  • 71% of adults identify as Orthodox (up from 37% in 1991), yet
  • only 6% attend services at least weekly;
  • among Russian Orthodox, roughly 17% pray daily and 15% say religion is “very important.”

Pew’s own summary captured the pattern: Orthodox Christians in Europe are “more likely to believe than practice” (Pew Research Center, May 10, 2017; topline figures in the published dataset).

The Levada Center (designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities) tracks the same gap from inside Russia. Its April 2022 survey found 71% identifying as Orthodox but only about 9% attending services monthly or more, and some 43% never attending (Levada Center, “Religiosity,” May 18, 2022). A later wave found that only about 5% had attended an Easter service, even as some 82% marked Easter culturally (Levada Center, 2023). On fasting, Levada’s 2020 survey found that 78% keep their usual diet during Great Lent and only about 3% observe the full seven-week fast (Levada Center, March 3, 2020). The canonical practices that define an active Orthodox life — regular liturgy, confession, communion, fasting — engage on the order of one in ten Russians.

The pastoral question that follows is whether the Church’s post-Soviet strategy — privileging public presence, identity, and the restoration of buildings — has produced breadth at the expense of depth, and what catechesis could turn nominal affiliation into practice.

The Quality of the Monastic Revival

The numerical recovery of Russian monasticism has been extraordinary: from roughly 21 monasteries at the 1988 Millennium to 462 men’s and 482 women’s houses — 944 in all — reported at the Bishops’ Council of November 2017, with Kirill rounding to “about a thousand” when communities abroad are included (Moscow Patriarchate, November 29, 2017, mospat.ru/en/news/47970/; consistent with Post-Soviet Revival).

The qualitative question is whether spiritual substance has kept pace with bricks and mortar. Seven decades of Soviet suppression broke the chain of monastic transmission, so the reopening of monasteries outran the supply of experienced elders (startsy) able to form novices in the tradition (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010; Kenworthy, The Heart of Russia, 2010).

The most acute symptom is mladostarchestvo — “young-elderism,” the assumption of an elder’s authority by inexperienced confessors who demand of parishioners the unconditional obedience proper only to advanced monastic life. The Holy Synod addressed it directly in a decree of December 28, 1998 (formally titled, in part, a ruling on “the increasingly frequent cases of abuse by certain pastors of the God-given authority to bind and loose”). The decree warned confessors against transferring monastic obedience onto parish life, interfering in personal and family decisions, and coercing the faithful toward monastic vows, donations, or the refusal of medicine and civic duties; the priest, it insisted, must advise, not impose (decree text at religare.ru; reference at azbyka.ru). The decree’s existence is itself evidence that the revival’s pastoral quality has been a live concern at the highest level.

Theological Education Reform

Under Patriarch Kirill the Church undertook a systematic reform of theological education, aligning seminaries with state academic standards in a Bologna-style tiered structure. From 2010 seminaries moved toward a bachelor’s program — typically structured as a one-year preparatory year plus a four-year bachelor’s degree — with master’s and postgraduate tiers above (peer-reviewed analysis in Procedia [ScienceDirect], 2017; Educational Committee [Uchebny Komitet] documents at uchkom.info).

The institutional centrepiece is the Ss Cyril and Methodius General Church Postgraduate and Doctoral School (OTsAD), founded on March 31, 2009 on Kirill’s initiative. Two milestones followed: in October 2015 the state’s Higher Attestation Commission (VAK) recognized theology as a scientific specialty, and in May 2016 the first theology dissertation council was established jointly by OTsAD, the St. Tikhon University (PSTGU), Moscow State University, and RANEPA; OTsAD received state accreditation in February 2018 (Pravenc.ru; Moscow Patriarchate, February 7, 2018, mospat.ru/en/news/47716/; OrthoChristian, 2015–2016).

The driving figure of these reforms was Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), who from March 2009 served simultaneously as DECR chairman and OTsAD’s first rector. His removal from these posts on June 7, 2022 and reassignment to Budapest — widely linked to his position on the war — placed the reform’s most prominent architect at a remove from its leadership, even as the standardization of seminaries, licensing, and accreditation continued under the Educational Committee (OrthoChristian, June 2022).

Diaspora versus Moscow after 2022

The war exposed a fault line between the Moscow Patriarchate and its parishes abroad, where many clergy and faithful refused to commemorate a patriarch who blessed the invasion. Several documented departures followed.

Amsterdam. The Russian parish of St. Nicholas of Myra was the first in Western Europe to break with Moscow over the war. After the Moscow-appointed archbishop intervened to enforce the commemoration of Kirill, and after the parish received threats, its clergy — led by Archimandrite Meletios (Webber) — announced in mid-March 2022 that they could no longer function under Moscow and requested transfer to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, into whose Exarchate of the Benelux they were received. The clergy sought canonical release rather than being defrocked (Orthodoxy in Dialogue, March 12, 2022; Orthodox Times, March 12, 2022).

Lithuania. Under Metropolitan Innokentiy (Vasilyev), three priests — Vitalijus Mockus, Gintaras Sungaila, and Vitalis Dauparas — were dismissed in April 2022 for anti-war stances and reported being defrocked by mid-year. On February 17, 2023 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate reinstated five Lithuanian clergy, ruling the depositions political rather than canonical, and on May 1, 2023 Constantinople established a Patriarchal Exarchate of Lithuania (recognized by the Lithuanian state in February 2024). Separately, Moscow’s Holy Synod formed a commission in May 2022 to study the Lithuanian diocese’s request for greater autonomy (Orthodox Times; OrthoChristian; Ecumenical Patriarchate entity pages; LRT).

Elsewhere. In Paris, Archbishop John of Dubna, head of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe (under Constantinople since 2019), publicly condemned the war as “monstrous and senseless” in March 2022 without formally breaking further. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, individual clergy and parishes left the Moscow Patriarchate, some joining the Romanian jurisdiction, and many Western European Moscow-Patriarchate parishes quietly ceased commemorating Kirill without formally departing (University of Fribourg / Orthodoxia, March 2022; contemporary reporting).

These cases are individually small but cumulatively significant: they mark the limit of Moscow’s authority over a diaspora that, after 2022, would no longer follow the Patriarch into a war it could not accept.

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