Sam Adeyemi, Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, stressed the importance of authenticity and honesty in leadership, particularly in the church, after publicly admitting a mistake made during a sermon.

In a podcast shared on social media on Tuesday, Adeyemi recalled an incident from a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic. During a church teaching session, he stated that the eagle is the world’s highest-flying bird, a claim he had heard for decades.

“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,’” he said.

Upon receiving the message, Adeyemi said he immediately checked online and discovered the correction was valid.

“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 admitted.

Acknowledging his mistake, he returned to church and issued an apology. “I went back to church and I apologised. I told them, this is what one of you said. I checked it up,” he said.

Adeyemi used the opportunity to call for greater involvement of younger people in leadership, noting that access to information has changed the way people engage with authority.

“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,” he said. “Now they are saying hypocrisy. That’s why people are leaving the church—because people are holding their ground.”

He added that many young congregants now verify teachings using digital tools, including researching biblical texts in their original languages.

“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,” he said.

Adeyemi stressed that while perfection is not expected of leaders, honesty is.

“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,” he stated.

He said the response to his apology was overwhelmingly positive.

“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.”

ASA