Dr. John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907) was a Scotland born Minister, faith healer & founder of Zion City, Illinois (now known as just Zion). Dowie spent time ministering in Australia and later moved to Chicago, IL in America where he started the Christian Catholic Church in 1895, and later in 1903 renamed it as The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church. Both churches had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism. Around 1900 Dowie personally purchased a large track of land that would be known as Zion City, and Dowie set the city up as a theocratic government and outlawed smoking, drinking, the eating of Biblically unclean animals, and the practice of any form of modern medicine in order to set the city up as a Christian community. Dowie even established businesses in the city for the thousands that traveled across the world to live in Zion City.

Dowie was a believer in the Anglo-Israel message and promoted it in his national newspaper Leaves of Healing, and many men who were influenced by his ministry would go on to teach it as well like F. F. Bosworth, Gordan Lindsay, and Charles F. Parham, Gordan Lindsay, and many others.