The Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, Sam Adeyemi, has shared how he handled being corrected by a church member over an error he made during a sermon.
In a podcast circulating on social media on Tuesday, Adeyemi recounted the incident, which occurred a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic during a teaching session in church.
At the time, he had stated that the eagle is the highest flying bird in the world—an assertion he admitted he had believed 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.
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“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.
Adeyemi used his church member’s correction to reflect on the growing trend of congregants—especially younger ones—verifying teachings in real time.
“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 young people now have access to tools that help them deeply examine religious teachings, even 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 leaders are not expected to be flawless but must be honest.
“Nobody says we should be perfect. People are not expecting us to be perfect, but they want us to be perfectly honest,” he stated.
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