I don’t think this would “cause problems down the line.” This is a visual issue that is determined by what each device’s rendering engine is, yeah? Some will display properly, others won’t (until their engine is updated anyway).
In the meantime, <br/> is only supposed to be a line feed, so it is inheriting line-height from its parent. If it’s critical to have that extra line-height in a line feed, then it should be included in the parent…if you are only looking for extra spaces between verses, then start a new line <p class="space"> or something.