By Oyewole Sarumi
There is a sentence that every leader should read slowly: no one is perfect. The brightest mind can make mistakes, and even a faithful preacher can be wrong. But a true believer will not remain comfortable in error or deception.
Christ is faithful to lead His own into the truth. The claim is not merely a concession to human weakness. It is a theological diagnosis of leadership, a description of spiritual formation, and a summons to a particular kind of discipleship.
The critical issue is not whether leaders will be wrong. They will. The critical issue is what happens next, whether a leader can be interrupted by truth, corrected by Scripture, confronted by a brother or sister, and led by the Spirit into a deeper obedience.
This is a more demanding matter than it first appears. Leadership cultures are often built around the appearance of certainty. Congregations want pastors who know where they are going. Teams want leaders who do not flinch. Institutions reward consistency, and consistency can quietly become a synonym for rigidity.
Yet the gospel does not begin with the competence of leaders. It begins with the faithfulness of Christ, who is the truth, and who has promised to lead His people into truth. A leader who cannot be corrected is not merely stubborn.
That leader has functionally displaced Christ with himself or herself. Spiritual formation, therefore, must include the cultivation of correctability: the grace-formed capacity to receive correction, to change one’s mind under Scripture, and to remain teachable when position, reputation, and institutional pressure all argue for self-protection.
The Universality of Error and the Particular Temptation of Leaders
The universality of error is one of the most consistently attested realities in Scripture. David, a man after God’s own heart, committed adultery and murder and had to be confronted by Nathan before he could say, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Samuel 12:13). Solomon, the wisest king Israel ever produced, turned toward idols in his later years (1 Kings 11). Moses, the mediator of the old covenant, struck the rock in a way that disobeyed God’s command and was barred from entering the Promised Land (Numbers 20:12). Peter, the leading apostle, denied Christ, and later in Antioch withdrew from table fellowship with Gentiles out of fear, so that even Barnabas was carried away by his hypocrisy (Galatians 2:11–13). These are not marginal figures. They are the leaders, teachers, and pioneers of the biblical story. If they could err, so can the brightest minds in any generation.
The research literature on leadership has begun to catch up with this biblical realism. Intellectual humility is now understood in psychology as the recognition that there are gaps in one’s knowledge and that one’s current beliefs might be incorrect. The British Psychological Society has observed that leaders often struggle with the simple sentence “I might be wrong here,” because leadership cultures continue to carry what researchers call “zombie leadership”, ideas that are demonstrably false but refuse to die, including the notion that leaders are a special class of people who possess extraordinary insight and should not be questioned. That mythology is spiritually dangerous. It creates what may be called an infallibility complex, in which a leader’s confidence becomes untouchable and the people around the leader learn that dissent is costly.
The temptation is particularly acute for those in ministry leadership. A pastor is expected to preach with authority, counsel with wisdom, and lead with vision. Over time, the congregation’s trust can become a kind of epistemic shield. The leader’s words are repeated, his interpretations are assumed, and his decisions are treated as beyond discussion. It is easy to move from “I have been entrusted with the ministry of the Word” to “I cannot be wrong about the Word.” The first is a stewardship.
The second is a usurpation. The apostolic pattern is different. When Peter’s conduct at Antioch contradicted the truth of the gospel, Paul opposed him to his face, and he did so not on the basis of personal rank but on the basis of the gospel itself (Galatians 2:14). Scripture, not office, is the final authority, and even an apostle can be publicly corrected when the truth is at stake.
The distinction between a mistake and a settled deception is crucial. A mistake is an unintentional deviation, a misjudgment, a blind spot, an error of understanding or application. A deception is something more: it is a falsehood that has been embraced, defended, and allowed to take up residence in the conscience. Let’s be careful here. We are not saying that a true believer will never make a mistake. We says that a true believer will not remain comfortable in error or deception.
The mark of regeneration is not sinless perfection but a fundamental orientation toward truth. The righteous may fall seven times, but they rise again (Proverbs 24:16). The wicked, by contrast, fall and refuse to return. Comfort in error is the tell. A leader who can be shown the truth and yet feels no grief, no disruption, no willingness to reconsider, has revealed something about the condition of the heart. A leader who is unsettled by the possibility of being wrong is not weak. That leader is still alive to the Spirit.
The Anatomy of Comfort in Error
Comfort in error rarely announces itself. It is usually dressed in respectable clothing: loyalty to a tradition, concern for institutional stability, fear of confusing the flock, or the honest belief that one has already studied the matter sufficiently and infallible due to years of experience or sojourn in ministry. Yet beneath these rationalizations there is often something more basic. The leader’s identity has become fused with being right. To admit error feels like a loss of self, not merely a correction of judgment. This is why criticism can provoke disproportionate defensiveness, and why a simple question can be heard as an act of insubordination. We have seen how it took years for some popular or famous church leaders to come out openly to declare that they are wrong!
For example, yhe case of Peter at Antioch is a masterclass in how comfortable error works. Peter had received a vision from God, had defended Gentile inclusion at the Jerusalem Council, and had eaten freely with Gentile believers. Yet when emissaries from James arrived, he withdrew from the table out of fear. His behavior was not a private preference. It was a public contradiction of the gospel, and it pressured others to follow him. Even Barnabas, a respected leader and missionary, was led astray. The text is unsparing: “the rest of the Jews joined him in his hypocrisy” (Galatians 2:13). Error at the top becomes contagious. Leaders do not sin in isolation. Their blind spots become institutional weather.
The Puritan teacher Joseph Caryl described the spiritual stakes with unusual clarity. “A gracious spirit is a teachable spirit,” he wrote. “A man that is willing to be taught, is in a better condition than many, who are able to teach. It argues a holier temper of the heart, to be willing to be taught, than to be able to teach. And it is far worse to be unwilling to learn, than not to be knowing: Unteachableness is more dangerous than ignorance.” Caryl then pressed the point to its logical conclusion: “He is in a fair way to truth, who acknowledges he may be in an error. And he who will not acknowledge that he may be in an error, is certainly out of the way of truth”. That sentence deserves to be written above every pastor’s desk and every seminary lectern. The leader who cannot say “I may be wrong” is not standing on the truth. That leader is standing on a confidence that has become detached from the truth.
John Owen made the same diagnosis in the language of spiritual pathology: “The heart that trusts in itself is the most deceitful, and the soul that thinks it cannot err is already enslaved to pride and deception”. The connection between pride and deception is not accidental. Pride does not merely make a leader unpleasant to correct. It distorts the leader’s perception. The proud heart defends itself by filtering evidence, reframing criticism, and assigning blame elsewhere. Over time, the leader may sincerely believe that he or she is defending the truth when in fact the leader is defending a reputation. This is why the language of deception appears in what we are considering here. Deception is not always a conscious lie. It can be a settled self-deception that has been reinforced by power, isolation, and the absence of honest voices or toeholders which most church leaders of thiss modern era lacked big time!
Contemporary research helps explain why this happens. Human beings have a natural tendency toward naïve realism, assuming that their own views of a situation are objective and complete rather than a thin slice of data filtered by biases. Leaders are especially vulnerable because they often receive less candid feedback than others because they are detached and lonely at the top. Research on intellectual humility has identified a “metacognitive core” consisting of recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and the awareness of one’s fallibility. When that core is weak, the result is an unfounded insistence that one’s own beliefs are correct and a disregard for those who disagree. The spiritual leader who neglects this dimension of formation may become biblically learned but epistemically arrogant, able to teach others and unable to be taught by anyone.
Christ’s Faithfulness and the Promise of Being Led into Truth
The hope we express in the statement does not rest on human perfectibility. It rests on the faithfulness of Christ. “Christ is faithful to lead His own into the truth.” This is a promise with deep biblical roots. Jesus said, “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). He also said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The truth into which Christ leads His people is not an abstract body of information. It is Himself. To be led into truth is to be led into a deeper conformity to Christ, a deeper understanding of Scripture, and a deeper obedience to the Father.
This promise is the ground of correctability. If Christ is faithful to lead His own into truth, then a leader does not have to pretend to be the final authority. The leader can be wrong because Christ is not wrong. The leader can be corrected because Christ is able to correct. The leader can receive correction from a younger colleague, a thoughtful layperson, an obscure passage of Scripture, or an unexpected circumstance, because the Spirit is not limited to the leader’s existing understanding. This is not a recipe for perpetual indecision. It is a recipe for perpetual teachability. The leader can hold convictions firmly while holding them under the lordship of Christ, knowing that if any conviction is not of the truth, Christ will expose it.
The story of Apollos illustrates how Christ’s faithfulness often works through ordinary correction. Apollos was eloquent, mighty in the Scriptures, and fervent in spirit, but his understanding of the way of God was incomplete. Priscilla and Aquila heard him preaching boldly in the synagogue, took him aside privately, and explained the way of God more accurately (Acts 18:24–26). The correction was not public humiliation. It was not a power play. It was a quiet act of discipleship. And Apollos received it. The result was not a diminished ministry but a more powerful one: he went on to refute the Jews publicly, showing from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ (Acts 18:28). A correctable leader is not a weaker leader. A correctable leader is a more useful one, because Christ can continue to shape that leader’s understanding and sharpen that leader’s witness.
The apostolic fathers understood this dynamic. Clement of Rome, writing to a church that was tempted toward faction and self-assertion, pleaded with the Corinthians to receive correction: “Let us receive correction, beloved, on account of which no one should feel displeased”. He also urged those who had caused division to “submit yourselves to the presbyters, and receive correction so as to repent, bending the knees of your hearts”. The imagery is striking. Correction is not a threat to the humble leader’s dignity. It is a posture of the heart. The knees of the heart are bent when a leader says, “I was wrong. Show me.” That is not the language of weakness. It is the language of a soul that has been captured by the truth.
Spiritual Formation as the Cultivation of Correctability
Spiritual formation is often described in terms of adding virtues: more prayer, more Scripture reading, more generosity, more zeal. Those are good things. But formation is also the subtraction of the defenses that keep truth at a distance. It is the slow work of becoming the kind of person who does not need to be right in order to be secure. The apostle Peter, who knew something about being corrected, wrote, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time He may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:5–6). Humility is not self-hatred. It is the honest creatureliness that knows it is not God.
The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter understood that pastoral leadership is especially vulnerable to the loss of this humility. “Our work must be carried on with great humility,” he wrote. “We must carry ourselves meekly and condescendingly to all; and so teach others, as to be ready to learn of any that can teach us, and so both teach and learn at once”. Baxter’s phrase “teach and learn at once” is a description of spiritual formation in leadership. The pastor who preaches on Sunday and cannot be taught on Monday has divided the ministry of the Word from the ministry of the Spirit. The same Holy Spirit who illuminates the congregation through the sermon is able to illuminate the preacher through the congregation. To deny that possibility is not conservative theology. It is a practical form of cessationism.
What does this look like in practice? It looks like leaders who build relationships with people who are not impressed by them. It looks like leadership teams where the question “What if we are wrong about this?” is treated as an act of faithfulness rather than an act of disloyalty. It looks like pastors who distinguish between private correction and public correction. Priscilla and Aquila took Apollos aside. Paul opposed Peter publicly because the error was public and the gospel was at stake. The difference is not arbitrary. It requires wisdom, courage, and charity. But the existence of that distinction should not become an excuse for avoiding correction altogether. The leader who only allows private correction but never public accountability has created a system in which appearances matter more than truth.
Research on intellectual humility suggests that correctability can be cultivated through structured reflection, exposure to challenging perspectives, psychological safety, and norms that legitimize fallibility. A thematic synthesis of twenty-four empirical studies identified eight psychological competencies and twelve interventions for promoting intellectual humility, concluding that such interventions are most effective when they integrate cognitive, emotional, and motivational learning within supportive social contexts. In other words, teachability is not just a private virtue. It is a communal ecology. A leader who wants to grow in correctability must be embedded in a community where it is safe to say “I was wrong” and where truth is valued more than the leader’s reputation.
The leadership literature is increasingly clear about the benefits of this kind of humility. A 2022 meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology synthesized data from fifty-three independent studies involving more than sixteen thousand five hundred employees and found that humble leadership, defined as viewing oneself accurately, appreciating others’ contributions, and modeling teachability, was strongly positively related to affective trust, employee creativity, engagement, and task performance. A 2023 meta-analysis covering 212 unique studies found that humble leadership was most strongly associated with followers’ satisfaction with the leader and with participative decision-making. And a 2024 study by Hu and colleagues found that when leaders recall learning from prior mistakes, they are more likely to express humility, suggesting that the discipline of remembering one’s own fallibility is itself a formative practice. These findings do not replace theological convictions. They illustrate them. The leader who can be corrected is not a leader who loses authority. That leader is a leader who builds a different kind of authority, one rooted in trust rather than pretense.
The research on misinformation points in the same direction. A meta-analysis of fifty-four studies found that people with higher intellectual humility are less susceptible to misinformation and more likely to engage in evidence-based behavior. The application to spiritual leadership is direct. The leader who says “I may be wrong; let me examine this” is not abandoning conviction. That leader is refusing to be captured by a false conviction. In an age of outrage, partisan religion, and algorithmic certainty, the correctable leader is a countercultural witness. Such a leader demonstrates that truth is not a possession to be defended but a Person to be followed.
The Cost of Remaining Comfortable and the Hope of Repentance
The cost of remaining comfortable in error is not paid only by the leader. It is paid by the people who follow. When Peter withdrew from the Gentiles, the rest of the Jews joined his hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was carried away. Leaders’ errors are rarely contained to leaders. They become the atmosphere of a family, a congregation, a seminary, or a movement. A pastor who refuses correction about his temper will shape a church that tolerates abuse. A leader who refuses correction about doctrine will disciple people into a distorted vision of God. A teacher who refuses correction about history or interpretation will pass on error to the next generation with the added weight of his or her authority. The stakes are not merely personal. They are pastoral and generational.
But the gospel does not end with warning. It ends with hope. Peter was corrected, and he received the correction. Later in his life, he wrote about humility and cast his anxieties on God (1 Peter 5:5–7). The man who once withdrew from the table became the man who called the church to clothe itself with humility. Barnabas, too, was restored to fruitful ministry, and Mark, the source of an earlier disagreement between Paul and Barnabas, later became useful to Paul for ministry (2 Timothy 4:11). The trajectories of Scripture are not trajectories of flawless leaders. They are trajectories of leaders who were interrupted, corrected, humbled, and restored. The true believer is not the one who never needs to be corrected. The true believer is the one who, when corrected, does not walk away from the truth.
This is why this final sentence is so important: “Christ is faithful to lead His own into the truth.” The faithfulness of Christ is not a soft doctrine that makes light of error. It is the strong doctrine that makes repentance possible. Because Christ is faithful, a leader can confess. Because Christ is faithful, a leader can change his mind. Because Christ is faithful, a leader can say to a congregation, “I was wrong, and here is what Scripture actually teaches.” That moment does not destroy spiritual authority. It reveals the kind of authority that is worth following. The leader who can be corrected is a leader who has placed his or her identity in Christ rather than in being right.
The Leader Who Belongs to the Truth
In closing, let me say that the church does not need leaders who never make mistakes. The church needs leaders who belong to the truth more than they belong to their own reputations. The brightest mind can make a mistake. The most faithful preacher can be wrong. But a true believer will not settle into error as though it were a home. The true believer will be restless in deception, uncomfortable in falsehood, and willing to be led by Christ into the truth, even when that leading requires the humiliation of repentance.
For leaders, this is both a warning and a promise. The warning is that position, expertise, and past faithfulness do not make anyone immune to error. The promise is that Christ has not abandoned His church to the fallibility of its leaders. He is faithful. He will lead His own into the truth. He will use Scripture, community, correction, and even the painful collapse of our self-assurance to bring us closer to Himself. The correctable leader is not the leader who has no convictions. The correctable leader is the leader whose convictions are held under the lordship of Christ and whose heart remains open to the voice of the Shepherd.
Spiritual formation, then, must be measured not only by what a leader knows but by how a leader responds when that knowledge is challenged by the truth. The final test of leadership is not the strength of one’s certainty but the honesty of one’s repentance. A leader who can be corrected is a leader who can still be led. And a leader who can still be led is a leader who has not yet reached the end of the journey. Christ is faithful to lead His own into the truth. The only question is whether we will remain teachable enough to follow.
Maranatha!!! Sola Scriptura!!!
Prof. Sarumi, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and teacher of the Word of God writes from Lagos. Tel: +234 803 304 1421, Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com
