There is a rather good and very chilling article in the most recent Atlantic by Eliza Griswold, daughter of the former Presiding Bishop, which casts some light on the reasons why Dr Akinola might want to hold a conference in Jerusalem without caring very much whether it upsets the Muslim Arabs.
“The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian heritage is being destroyed … You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islam-phobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing … Over the years, Christians have been so naive—avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they’re dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that money isn’t evil, the love of money is, and it isn’t wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics.”
Dr Akinola is not afraid of politics. He used to be the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, and attempted, against the statutes of the organisation, to stand for another term. While he was in office, the organisation preached and practised, remarkably muscular Christianity. Here is some more from Ms Griswold’s article:
A few hundred yards down the road from the church, [ in Yelwa, where 70 Christians had been murdered in a riot earlier] there’s a cornfield. In it, a row of mounds: more  mass graves. White signs tally the dead below in green paint: 110, 50, 65, 100, 55, 25, 60, 20, 40, 105. Two months after the church was razed, Christian men and boys surrounded Yelwa. Many were bare-chested; others wore shirts on which they’d reportedly pinned white name tags identifying them as members of the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organization founded in the 1970s to give Christians a collective and unified voice as strong as that of Muslims. Each tag had a number instead of a name: a code, it seemed, for identification. They attacked the town. According to Human Rights Watch, 660 Muslims were massacred over the course of the next two days, including the patients in the Al-Amin clinic. Twelve mosques and 300 houses went up in flames. Young girls were marched to a nearby Christian town and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many were raped, and 50 were killed.
…
When asked if those wearing name tags that read “Christian Association of Nigeria” had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,” he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on, “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”
Remember this, the next time someone tells you that Nigeria is the future of Christianity.
Well, I don’t think we need much more to remind us that Gibbon was right.