Christian Catholic Apostolic Church - John Alexander Dowie

John Alexander Dowie

John Alexander Dowie was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, May 25, 1847, to an evangelical family. The family immigrated to Australia in 1860, with Dowie returning to attend the University of Edinburgh from 1867 to 1872, at which time he once more sailed for Australia. In 1876 Dowie married and he began his evangelistic ministry three years later in Melbourne.

Dowie immigrated to San Francisco in 1888 where he founded the Ministry of Divine Healing. After years of traveling across the country preaching and healing, he finally settled in Chicago and in 1893 set up a tabernacle at the World's Columbian Exposition. During the next seven years, Dowie founded the Christian Catholic Church that met in several city locations including the Chicago Auditorium (1896). In 1900 he purchased land along the shores of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago near the Illinois Wisconsin border and founded a religious utopian community which he called Zion.

He also founded a commercial enterprise, which came to be called Zion Industries, to support the community. Initially its main product was Scottish lace and it enjoyed considerable success.

Dowie proselytized vigorously both in person and by means of several serial publications, chief among them being Leaves of Healing, and gained a lot of adherents. At its height in 1905, the church claimed some 30,000 members worldwide, of whom some 7500 settled in Zion. Two notable features of Dowie's preaching were faith healing and what he called holy living - his followers were admonished to abstain from tobacco, alcohol, pork products, doctors and medicines, the "apostate churches", etc.

Dowie had progressive views on race relations for his day and welcomed blacks into his church, of whom some 200 settled in Zion. He later sent some of them as missionaries to South Africa, where they established churches which became very influential.

As the community of Zion grew in size and prosperity, Dowie adopted an increasingly lavish lifestyle, building himself a 25 room mansion and dressing himself in ornate ecclesiastical robes modeled after those worn by Aaron, the high priest, described in Leviticus. Due to this and other financial mismanagement, the church was threatened with bankruptcy. In 1905 Dowie suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes. In 1906 his followers revolted, ousted him from leadership and elected Wilbur Glenn Voliva as the new leader of the church. A splinter group rejected the new leadership, left Zion, and some of them went on to become influential leaders of the budding Pentecostal movement. Dowie died of another stroke on March 9, 1907.

A bizarre sidelight on Dowie's later years is that he became embroiled in an acrimonious public dispute with a controversial Indian Muslim religious figure, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya movement. In 1903 they engaged in a widely publicized prayer duel, each calling upon God to punish the other to expose him as a false prophet. Ahmad and his followers proclaimed Dowie's rapidly ensuing illness, disgrace, and death as a vindication of their religious beliefs. Ahmad died in 1908, a year later than Dowie.