Brilliant, Mike. You said, "Love does not mean there will be no more pain, it simply means that when pain does come, as it inevitably will come, we are not overwhelmed by it." For most in our culture, love is understood more often as an "emotion". This is counterfeit. Real love, the currency of God, relies little on emotion. Instead it is a blend of devotion and sacrifice, which means it is always painflul and costly to some degree. Whenever it is expressed, real love always involves the bearing of some pain because it is always sacrificial, poured out in some costly way over the feet of Christ. Much as I have enjoyed the benefits of being part of a charismatic church in the past, the emphasis on freedom of emotional expression inevitably gets overplayed. I think that in this context the love of God (the central theme of our faith) becomes lost and confused with emotion being the counterfeit for it. People end up thinking that love really is all about emotion, especially when we keep singing these highly emotional songs to God that don't really cost us much because we can always sit back and wait for the professionals on the stage to do it for us anyway. It seems to me that the leadership at New Life are at a crossroads. Will they continue to support the counterfeit currency or will they do whatever it takes to get behind the real thing? My experience at New Life, going back a few years now, told me that many people in the congregation and middle management of the church at different seasons "got it", or understood this dilemma, way ahead of New Life core leadership. Eventually many of them left en masse and this was never a hasty decision. Among other reasons, it became foolish to continue to be subjugated by foolish leadership. I've seen a pattern in a number of different church and missions contexts over the years, where leadership folk work from a posture of believing that they have something more than the congregation, that the congregation is weak minded, and that leadership has nothing to learn from them. This is a posture of unadulterated arrogance. More often than not, the congregation seems to be leading the leadership, but the leadership have not condescended to follow or to be taught by their brothers and sisters. Countless times I've seen many folks in congregations exhibit far more understanding of the love of God and far more authentic leadership than those being paid to lead them. Personally, I've found this to be a tremendously frustrating and costly experience. At New Life, I saw many people working hard to keep quiet, biting their tongues with much patience and long suffering hoping and praying that leadership will "get it". This they did for years on end. To me, while this is an expression of long suffering love, there is a point when it becomes a foolish pursuit. Why is it more often the case than not that the so called "pastor" hasn't got a pastoral bone in his body?! Getting back to systems theory thinking, the system, motivated as it is by the bottom line, is more representative of corporation than a family and a community, so it is hell bent on attracting type A ambition driven CEO types to leadership positions more than love motivated authentic pastor types. The "coup de gras" comes and seals the fate of a sick church by calling this CEO type "the man of God", suggesting that it's potentially dangerous to question him on issues of accountability. To add to the confusion we call him a pastor! Then we expect him to lead with the love of God. It's like giving the job of a homing pidgeon to an ostrich - it just doesn't fly! ... yet we hang on, year after year, hoping and praying that this ostrich will fly because it has "homing pidgeon" (pastor) on it's business card! The ostrich may run faster and stand taller but it will never fly. You said earlier on that "people are not stupid". I disagree to some extent. It's true that people can see through a pastors' issues and weaknesses and that he's stupid to think that no one is aware of this ... but speaking as a recovering churchoholic, I have to say that it was stupid of me to put up with that kind of nonsense for so long. I should have confronted him openly about being an ostrich instead of thinking for so long in some delusional way that if I wait long enough and pray hard enough that he will somehow morph into a homing pidgeon. Poor illustration, I know, but that's what came to mind! :o)