Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, Sam Adeyemi, has narrated how a member corrected him after church service.
He recently revealed that he wrongly claimed that eagles are the highest flying birds, prompting a correction from one of his members.
Speaking during an interview on The Teju Babyface Show, Sam said that after his incorrect claim that eagles are the highest flying birds, the member in question simply sent him a text later in the day, and politely informed him that the claim was inaccurate.
According to him, a quick Google research then proved that the correction was right because he later found out that eagles do not even feature among the top ten highest flying birds.
The man of God then shared that the beauty of that experience is that he is humble and wise enough to see the advantages that come with learning from others, even as a leader.
“The next day, a church member sent a text message to Pastor Nick and said, ‘I know I don’t have the right to correct Pastor Sam, but he said something in church yesterday that the eagle is the highest flying bird in the world. That statement is not correct. As she was saying it, I was on my phone checking on Google. The person was right. The eagle doesn’t even come within the first ten,” he said.
Confirming that he went back to church to apologise for misleading them with a false fact, he urged leaders to learn to own up to their mistakes when they are called out for it.
Pastor Adeyemi noted that while most Nigerians keep on seeing a lot of hypocrisy in leadership, it pays to deliver authenticity and honesty, especially because no one is perfect.
The clergyman further stated that most Nigerian citizens do not want a perfect leader; they only want a leader who will be perfectly honest.
“I went back to church and I apologised. I told them, this is what one of you said. I checked it up.
We don’t realise you said something now that you said before and nobody would even bother to follow it. They are checking on Google as you are saying it. Now they are saying hypocrisy. That’s why people are leaving the church—because people are holding their ground.
These young people have gone to check all those in the original Greek that you were saying before because nobody understood Greek. If they go online now, they will get the correct meaning of what you are saying.
They are seeing a lot of hypocrisy in leadership. They want authenticity. This is just a call on all of us to practise leadership with honesty. Nobody says we should be perfect. People are not expecting us to be perfect, but they want us to be perfectly honest.
When I owned up to that error on the eagle, then I was getting text messages and emails and people were saying, wow, thank you for doing that. I never thought the pastor could do that—to come back and admit that they were wrong,” he added.
