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 that he called Zion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahmad and his followers proclaimed Dowie's rapidly ensuing illness, disgrace, and death as a vindication of their religious beliefs.
Religions other than the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church were effectively banned - visiting preachers from rival sects were harassed and hounded out of town by the city police force.
Ham, bacon, oysters, liquor and tobacco were banned, as were drugstores, medical buildings, movie theaters, and globes (as they challenged Voliva's flat-earth cosmology).
These laws were enforced by Voliva's police force, called the Praetorian Guard, whose helmets carried the word 'PATIENCE' and whose sleeves bore images of doves.
Like his predecessor Dowie, Voliva increasingly developed an overtly lavish lifestyle, which began to alienate his followers, especially after the hardships brought on by the Great Depression, which forced the town's sole employer, Zion Industries, into bankruptcy.
In 1935 Voliva tried to revive the flagging fortunes of the church by instituting the annual Zion Passion Play, along the lines of the famous one in Oberammergau.
In 1942 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Voliva made a tearful public confession to his followers that he had misappropriated church funds for his personal use and committed other misdeeds.