Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Pastor Who Trained 45,000 Leaders Across Africa and Beyond | Dr. Sam Adeyemi - Founder of Daystar Christian Centre (20,000+ Members)
Transcript
- 0:00In this lessons episode, explore how personal transformation begins with purpose and grows through intentional leadership.
- 0:06Discover how faith can unlock hidden potential and reshape identity.
- 0:09Understand why leadership is a skill that can be developed by anyone and uncover how serving others creates lasting impact and defines true success.
- 0:17Talk to me about your journey. Talk to me about, you know, you at one point in your life found God.
- 0:31I don't think from what I understand God was always as prominent in your life.
- 0:36I mean, your father was an engineer. It's not like you came from a family of people that were involved in the church of the degree that you are.
- 0:43So how did you find God? How did you decide to be this person in this life?
- 0:50Right. Thank you. So I was born basically into a Christian family. We went to church, but as far as having a personal relationship was concerned,
- 1:05that didn't come in until I went into college. Amazingly, one of my uncles had just become a born again Christian.
- 1:18He was a college student and he was like on fire for God. And the first thing he wanted to do was to lead everybody in the family to Christ, especially as young people.
- 1:30So the day my dad took me to college, he knew to resume. He came along and then at my hostel, he saw all the various groups and clubs in my college.
- 1:45They had put off science, inviting young students to join them. Then he said to me, you see, all those, all those,
- 1:53but don't join them. Okay. This one for the Christian Union. That's the one you should join. Okay. I said, thank you. Thank you, uncle.
- 2:02In my mind, I was thinking, you just go away. I only enjoy my life. Okay, this is the first time I'm having freedom away from home.
- 2:10And I want to do what young people do. But amazingly, somebody came, a preacher came on our campus.
- 2:17And this was like two months after, three months after I resumed college, did a big crusade was preaching.
- 2:25And then I just decided to have a change of mind, interestingly, and gave my life to Christ, you know, accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior.
- 2:35And it was an interesting change for me because I actually experienced the influence of God in my life.
- 2:46I tell you one significant part to it. Whenever I left down to pray in school, it would be like somebody pressed play on a video play cassette.
- 3:00No, I mean, this was a long time ago. Like this was like 40 years ago. Okay. I was a teacher. So you look, by the way, just a point, you look incredibly good for that being 40 years ago. So whatever you're doing, I want some advice. Good for you.
- 3:16Thank you, Scott. So I would see myself standing before people to speak, you know, and to teach.
- 3:27Now, that was very remarkable for me because I am introverted. I used to be extremely shy, you know, I found it and go to look into the eyes of just one person.
- 3:39So to even imagine me standing in front of a crowd to speak was completely out of it. And these thoughts only came when I prayed.
- 3:49So that made me know this had to be the spirit of God influencing my mind. This had to be God's design for me. Okay. So yes, I was studying to be a civil engineer, what it looks like. There is another part of my life I didn't know was there.
- 4:06Okay. And three within a short while, I was elected into positions, you know, in my fellowship in school. That's why the leadership things started. Before I was out of college, I was leading the whole fellowship, you know, in my college.
- 4:24And then when I got out in Nigeria, you have this one year mandatory service to the nation. Every college graduate goes through it, except yeah, over 30.
- 4:35And it just so happened for each state, the people in the service, they choose someone to head the whole Christian group for a whole state.
- 4:49I was choosing to lead the Christian group for my whole state, which was very surprising for me again, because I was so quiet. I didn't know anybody saw me, right.
- 5:01And once you were elected to do that, you couldn't do anything else. That was what you did full time for the one year.
- 5:08So.
- 5:09So that's that's how I got into this line, but beautiful part to it, like I said, is it's been something really, really practical for me, because I was able to discover my talents.
- 5:25Okay, I was able to take my attention of myself, because that was what made me struggle at the beginning, because things were hard. Like I said, for my family, I was desperate to succeed.
- 5:40And to succeed meant to have a good job, to have money, to have cash to drive, to have a good house and and all that and be able to travel the world. But, you know,
- 5:52somewhere along the line, an elderly person, a minister at our church looked at me and said, I want you to read the book. That's something about you. And he gave me the first book I read on leadership.
- 6:07Christian leadership by Donald S. Altman.
- 6:14Now, for the fact that this was over 30 years ago, and the book was already old then, you can imagine how old the book is, but it was the first book I was reading on leadership and he learned me the book.
- 6:25So I took a notebook, a small Jota, and I wrote down all the major points in the book. I'll tell you again, an inflection point I had written the book.
- 6:37The author said, those old ideas, that suggests that a few people are born to lead. Everybody else is born to follow. He said those ideas are dead.
- 6:48He said they were pushed by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Yep. He said, but if you read your Bible and you see that God created money in his own image and told him to have dominion.
- 7:03You would know therefore that every human being has the capacity to lead. Then he listed the auto listed the qualities of a leader and said, whoever you are, look at the list. You have some of the qualities already.
- 7:16The ones you don't have, you can cultivate. Honestly, he was speaking to me for the first time I accepted the fact that I could lead.
- 7:28I began to consciously develop the qualities of a leader and thought since then, wherever I have been, I've literally just floated to the top. I've been able to develop my capacity to influence people for good.
- 7:42So I came to the conclusion that at the highest level of success, you help other people to succeed. That's also made me big on leadership.
- 7:54Well, I think that I think that it's interesting. There's various types of work that's done that are not in the business sense. I even spoke about this before we started. So spiritual leadership. I think even some sports leaders, some coaches, some military leaders and some military admirals and captains and whatnot.
- 8:15There's so much wisdom in some of the things that people do in a day-to-day that isn't just from running a business that can be so applicable to if you want to run a business, but also it could be for just being a leader in your own community and your own life.
- 8:30I think that's what you really tapped into. I think that's actually why your message resonates with so many people.
- 8:35So you built out a day-star Christian center and now I think you serve the millions of individuals and you teach them on spirituality and God and the Bible and all the things that are normally tied to religion.
- 8:51But then I think there's a lot of leadership principles because that's where a lot of your work lies, too. There's a lot of lessons that you teach over that are, yes, they're rooted in biblical lessons and wisdom.
- 9:01But also, they pass over leadership lessons to elevate the human and the human spirit. I love that.
- 9:08Thank you. I don't know where it's my background and the sciences, but I just have this passion for giving people information that they can apply to the day-to-day living.
- 9:27So even in my leading a church, I made up my mind that I was going to teach what was relevant.
- 9:39One of the things we did that revolutionized our ministry in day-star was that we asked what are people's needs.
- 9:50We actually looked at the demography of the people living five miles radius of our church.
- 9:58What's the age distribution? What are their needs?
- 10:02Now, this was Africa, this was Lagos Nigerian and poverty came tops.
- 10:09So we said, okay, wait, how have we been addressing the poverty problem? This was three years after our church started.
- 10:17And the only thing we had done was, I mean, we looked at my preaching and all I had been teaching was how people should give to the work of God.
- 10:27I then said, well, wait, we shouldn't be starting from there. People need to have the money before they can give it.
- 10:34Is there anything in the Bible? We can teach them that will help them to get the money.
- 10:39I actually prayed about it. And then when searching in the Bible, and I was amazed, I was amazed at how much is in the Bible about finances.
- 10:50And I saw entrepreneurship. In fact, I saw that some of the most prominent figures in the Bible were entrepreneurs. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, even Christ himself was a businessman of the age of 30.
- 11:04When he started his ministry fully and I thought, what?
- 11:07Most of his disciples Christ got from the business world. The fishermen were business people. And so it was like, I looked at some of the parables of Christ, the parable of talents and so on.
- 11:22And then I just went, I just, I mean, I exploded literally. I was teaching practical things from the Bible. Now that surprised people a lot.
- 11:35After some time, I zeroed in on entrepreneurship. So by then, because we were meeting practical needs, our church was literally exploded. Right.
- 11:45We were running one service to running for services in 10 months, because people were just coming. Right. 30 minutes into a service outside was full. There was a long line outside of people wanting to come in for the next service.
- 11:58Eventually, we were running five services on Sunday morning. Right. So the first service, I was teaching entrepreneurship.
- 12:06How to start and run a business from the Bible. And then later, I then zeroed in on the leadership issue.
- 12:15So I started a leadership school. We call it the day's time leadership academy.
- 12:20We graduated over 45,000 people from the leadership school now. And we teach what you would get from the average business school.
- 12:30The only difference is we also have biblical stories to support the things we're teaching, but the principles are the same and they're so powerful. Right.
- 12:39Just yesterday, somebody sent me a direct message on LinkedIn and said, I would want an opportunity to talk to you. I want to tell you how my wife and I attended the day style leadership academy.
- 12:54Started our business, the big kicks. Right. And he said, now we have a hundred people on our stuff.