He moved to the rapidly expanding industrial town of Birmingham in 1844 to become minister of the Mount Zion Baptist Chapel where the eloquence and beliefs that the young man expressed soon attracted a large following.

He called upon his congregation to join him in the struggle "to improve conditions in the town and the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens".

His sermons electrified the Birmingham public and influential members of his Church included Joseph Chamberlain (who took Sunday School and oversaw the accounts), Jesse Collings, George Dixon, J.

A. Langford, Robert Martineau, Samuel Timmins, William Harris, A. F. Osler, and the Kenrick family, all of whom played an important part in local affairs and took on his ideals.

His idea of the civic gospel and his advocacy of free education was strongly supported by the Congregational spokesman Dr. R. W. Dale, and by J. T. Bunce, influential editor of the Birmingham Daily Post.

A correspondent writing to Aris's Birmingham Gazette in 1847 described him as a person "whose views and proceedings are calculated to produce considerable mischief"; and as "a young man who ... has prided and plumed himself upon more than he possesses and has consequently fallen into great and grievous errors".

Dawson was famous during his lifetime for lecturing on a wide range of subjects from Shakespeare to German poetry, Italian history to good etiquette.

Dawson was a friend of Carlyle and Emerson and did a great deal to popularize their teachings, especially in his demand for a high ethical standard in everyday life and his insistence that citizenship needed a specifically Christian approach.

His address at the opening of the Birmingham Reference Library[5] gives a flavour of what the civic gospel meant to the Victorian municipal activists: The opening of this glorious library, the first fruits of a clear understanding that a great town exists to discharge towards the people of that town the duties that a great nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation – that a town exists here by the grace of God, that a great town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man's intellectual and moral nature... We are a Corporation, who have undertaken the highest duty that is possible to us; we have made provision for our people – for all our people – and we have made a provision of God's greatest and best gifts unto Man.Dawson died suddenly at Kings Norton on 30 November 1876 and was buried in Key Hill Cemetery.