Nigerian Leaders/Pastors Must Be Open To Learning From Their Followers – Sam Adeyemi

Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, Sam Adeyemi, has come out to narrate how a member once corrected something he said during a church service. He recently had his say while speaking during an interview on The Teju Babyface Show, and fans have been reacting.

According to him, it all started when he wrongly claimed that eagles are the highest flying birds during a sermon, but to his utmost surprise, a member of his church sent him a text later in the day, politely informing him that the claim was inaccurate.

Sam added that the beauty of that experience was the fact that he was humble and wise enough to know that leaders must always be open to learning from others, even their followers.

His words, “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.

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.”

WOW.