Peter Akinola was born in 1944 to a Yoruba family in Abeokuta in southwestern Nigeria . His father died when he was four years old and due to financial pressures Akinola had to leave school early. He learned carpentry and at twenty he had a successful furniture business and as patent-medicine seller. He had finished high school by distance education. He left his business, to study for the priesthood. He studied at a Nigerian Anglican seminary and was ordained a deacon in 1978 and a priest in 1979 in the Anglican Church of Nigeria. Soon after ordination, he moved to the United States to study at the Virginia Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1981 with a master's degree.