Archbishop Charles Agyinasare, founder and leader of Perez Chapel International, has issued a heartfelt yet uncompromising call to Ghanaians: when you have shared a lie, do not simply move on. Do not quietly delete the post and pretend it never happened. Do not tell yourself that you were only one of many, and that the damage would have occurred with or without you. In a Sunday sermon on October 11, 2026, titled “The Venom of Falsehood – When Lies Become Weapons of Destruction,” the archbishop asked his listeners to think about misinformation not as an abstract problem, but as a poison that enters families, churches, and communities through ordinary people. He insisted that discovering that something one shared was false should not end with regret. Instead, it must be followed by concrete actions that repair what has been broken. “If you discover that something you shared was false, repentance requires action,” he said. Those words carry a weight many of us try to avoid. We often imagine repentance as a private feeling of guilt, a quiet resolution to do better next time. But Agyinasare’s message turns that comfortable idea inside out. True responsibility, he explained, means walking back the lie as far as it has travelled. It means telling the people whom you misled that what they heard from you was wrong. It means apologising to the person whose reputation was stained, and it means doing whatever can be done to correct the false impression that now lives in the minds of others. That is difficult. It is humiliating. It is far easier to hope that no one remembers what you said. Yet the archbishop reminded his listeners that real love and justice require more than passive regret. A person who has been wounded by a lie cannot simply be ignored; someone has to clean the wound. In urging Ghanaians to take responsibility, he was not speaking to a handful of malicious people who deliberately spread lies to destroy others. He was speaking to all of us, including those who share misinformation out of care, fear, anger, or the simple human desire to be the first to tell a story.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the sermon was its practicality. Agyinasare did not leave his listeners with vague thoughts about being better people. He gave them clear steps to follow when they realise they have shared something false. Where possible, remove the false post from your page. If it has already reached people through private messages, contact those people directly and tell them that what they received was false. Do not assume they will figure it out later. Do not wait for the truth to circulate as quietly as the lie did. Go back to the very people who trusted you and admit that you passed on something poisonous. Then apologise to the people who were harmed. This is the part we are most likely to avoid, because it forces us to look into the eyes of someone we have wronged and say, “I did this. I am sorry.” Finally, correct the impression that the lie created. A lie does its work by leaving behind a distorted picture of reality, and simply removing the original post does not erase that picture from people’s memories. It has to be replaced by something true. The archbishop’s insistence on these steps may sound demanding, but it is deeply humane. When a person is publicly accused of something they did not do, the accusation takes on a life of its own. It appears in group chats, it is repeated in conversations, it is remembered in whispers. The person who started the chain has a unique power to stop it, if only they are willing to speak with the same courage they used when they shared the lie. In an age of endless notifications, where rumours can traverse the country in minutes, the ability to go back and say “that was wrong” is a form of moral courage. Agyinasare challenged Ghanaians to stop treating information as something that can be fired and forgotten, and to start seeing every message as a responsibility. If words can build, they can also destroy. If sharing is easy, correcting is not. But correction, he argued, is exactly what love requires.
Beyond outright lies, the archbishop also turned his attention to half-truths, and this part of his message deserves special attention. We often think that as long as something is not entirely invented, it is not false. But Agyinasare warned that information can contain accurate details and still misrepresent what actually happened when important context is missing. Sometimes the lie is not in the fact itself but in what is left out. A photo can be real, but the caption placed beside it can build an entirely false story. A recording can be genuine, but if it has been edited, it can make someone appear to have said the opposite of what they intended. A statement can be pulled from its context and suddenly look sinister. The archbishop’s message was a warning to anyone who likes to share things that merely feel true, or true enough, or true in part. He put the question plainly: “The question is not merely, ‘Is there something true in this?’ We must also ask, ‘Does this fairly represent what happened?’” This is a deeper way of thinking about truth. We often treat accuracy as if it were a single fact, like a date or a name. But real truthfulness has to do with fairness and proportion. It involves presenting things as they actually are, not only as they appear when chopped, filtered, and arranged for maximum outrage. The archbishop cautioned against choosing only the facts that support a particular story and ignoring everything that might complicate it. That kind of selective presentation is everywhere these days. A person can take one foolish sentence spoken many years ago and present it as the whole character of a human being. Someone can share a snippet of a conflict and leave out the insults that provoked it. This kind of partial truth is often more dangerous than a complete invention, because it has just enough reality to make people trust it. It can damage reputations, destroy relationships, and cause innocent people to suffer. Agyinasare did not let his listeners off the hook by simply saying “do not lie.” He called them to examine whether they were doing justice to the whole story, or only using truth as a weapon.
To show how false accusations can ruin a life, Agyinasare reached for one of the most painful stories in Scripture. The story of Joseph is familiar, but the archbishop used it to expose the terrible power of a carefully constructed lie. Joseph was innocent. He had done nothing wrong. Yet when Potiphar’s wife decided to use him as the object of her deception, Joseph found himself in prison, far from home, separated from the future he had been promised. The story demonstrates how a single false accusation can have devastating consequences for someone who has done no wrong. It is not hard to imagine Joseph’s shock. He had served Potiphar faithfully. He had resisted wrongdoing. And still, one false story was enough to take everything from him. That is the terrible power of falsehood. It does not need to be true to be believed. It only needs to be told by someone who seems confident, or to arrive at a moment when people are ready to accept it. The same thing happens many times over online. A false accusation is posted, and before anyone has verified a single detail, the accused person is judged and sentenced in the court of public opinion. They may be fired from a job, abandoned by friends, or hounded on social media. The truth may catch up eventually, but the damage has already been done. There is a difference between wanting justice and being careless with accusations. The archbishop’s reference to Joseph reminds us that behind every false report there is a human being who may be innocent. When we share accusations carelessly, we are not simply sharing information; we are participating in the punishment of someone who may not deserve it. We are playing the role of the jailer, and sometimes the judge. The church leader’s message asked listeners to imagine themselves in Joseph’s place. How would they want the world to respond? Would they want people to wait for evidence, to ask questions, to refuse to spread the story until it had been tested? That empathy, if we allow it, can change the way we behave online. Before joining in the rage, we should remember that there are always two sides, and that a lie can send an innocent person to prison just as quickly as it can trend on social media.
At the centre of Agyinasare’s message was a simple but essential discipline: verify before you share. He urged social media users and the wider public to pause, to examine the source, and to consider the context of any message before forwarding it or publishing an allegation about someone else. He suggested a set of questions that each of us can ask in the small seconds before our thumb presses “send.” Do I actually know that this is true? Have I checked the source? Do I understand the context in which the words were spoken or the photo was taken? Will sharing this help to address wrongdoing responsibly, or will it simply spread an accusation? Those are not easy questions, especially when a message confirms our own suspicions or makes us feel important. We want to be the person who exposes the hypocrisy, who shares the gossip first, who shows the world what everyone else is missing. But the cost of being wrong is far greater than the embarrassment of being cautious. The archbishop also said something that may be unpopular to many: do not try to defend yourself against false accusations by creating more falsehoods. If someone has misrepresented you, your answer is not to exaggerate their wrongdoing or to spread half-true stories about them. You defend yourself truthfully, with integrity, even when you are angry. That is an especially uncomfortable teaching in a time when our first instinct is to fight fire with fire. But falsehood never cleans up falsehood. The moment you become a liar in order to defend your reputation, you hand your enemies a truth they can use against you. Agyinasare’s call to verify and to respond with integrity is about protecting everyone, including ourselves. If we all took it seriously, the culture of outrage would begin to lose its oxygen. Rumours would not travel so fast, accusations would not be accepted so easily, and people would not be so casually destroyed. We have to learn to sit with uncertainty. Not everything has to be shared immediately. Not every injustice has to be resolved by us alone. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is wait, ask, and seek the truth before adding our voice to the noise.
Archbishop Agyinasare’s sermon ended with a vision of a society that refuses to let falsehood rule. He called on Ghanaians to break the cycle of lies by refusing to circulate unverified claims, and by correcting information whenever they discover it is inaccurate. That may sound like a small thing, but it is not. Every time we correct a lie, we create a small space in which truth can breathe again. Every time we admit that we were wrong, we give other people permission to be honest about their own mistakes. Every time we apologise to someone we have harmed with careless words, we restore a little of the dignity that our sharing took away. In this way, the archbishop lifted the issue of misinformation from the level of personal manners and placed it where it belongs: at the heart of public and private morality. The responsibility to uphold the truth, he insisted, does not end at avoiding lies. We also have to correct the harm that lies cause as they spread. That is a much higher standard. It says that silence is not enough. Deleting a post without telling anyone it was wrong is not enough. Saying “sorry, I didn’t know” and moving on is not enough. We have to take part in the repair. We have to look for the people we misled and lead them out of the falsehood we walked them into. This is the kind of teaching we do not hear very often. It does not give us an easy excuse. It does not allow us to hide behind our intentions. But it is exactly the teaching our generation needs, not only in Ghana, but everywhere that information is used and abused. The archbishop was not scolding his listeners from a distance; he was inviting them into a better way to be human. In a world where lies can become weapons of destruction, the greatest act of resistance is to hold onto the truth, to speak it humbly, to verify it carefully, and to repair the damage when we have failed to protect it. That is what it means to be people who truly care about each other. That is what it means to repent not only in word, but in action.