"what will your response be if your Patriarch or Pope steps up and says follow this person? Since the Apostate church will exist; what keeps you from following a counciliar recommendation to follow a great peace-maker who claims to be aligned with Christianity?"
Sadly, Orthodoxy has a long history of heresiarchs, but happily, we've always been able to get rid of them. What keeps us from following them, or following them for long, is our innate and God given sense of what is Orthodox and Catholic and what is not...and its almost always the laity which discovers these defaults and acts on it. Maybe God has prepared us for the coming of the Anti-Christ and the "Apostate Church".