Brand or church? How Hillsong is facing a day of reckoning

People pray during a service at Hillsong Church in New York. Photograph: Andrés Kudacki/AP

It was an emotional sermon and Phil Dooley, the interim leader of the global evangelical megachurch Hillsong was preaching about pain.

“Pain happens in life – sometimes we cause the pain,” he told Hillsong congregations around the world from its Hills Campus headquarters in western Sydney last Sunday. “In order to get healthy, sometimes we have to go through some pain.”