After spending two years in
Nablus, he was stationed in
Nazareth, where he stayed for the next 20 years. In Nazareth he became a very well-known person, not only in the town itself, but also in all of the Galilee area. In 1858 he went back for a year to England, there he was ordained as an Anglican priest. When he returned, he married Hanna Maria Sophie, the daughter of
Maria Gobat and
Samuel Gobat, the second
Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem. Zeller believed that education was the main method to get to the heart of the people and to increase the Protestant influence in Nazareth and the area. This was not easy, since there was great pressure on those people who sent their children to the Protestant school. However, Zeller persevered to establish and develop the school, believing that it would be the seed for the Anglican denomination. Furthermore, he did not stop in Nazareth, but opened classes in
Reineh,
Kafr Kanna and Jaffa of Nazareth (
Yafa an-Naseriyye), and later on in
Shefa-'Amr. In the early 1870s he rented a room in
Acre and started classes there. He also assisted his Armenian colleague
Kaloost Vartan of the
Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society in the founding of
the Nazareth Hospital. Zeller’s activities contributed significantly to the establishment and the growth of the denomination, especially in Nazareth where the need to build a proper center became a pressing one. In July 1871, and after a long contest with the Ottoman governor, the building of the
Christ Church, Nazareth was completed. At the dedication ceremony on 1 October 1871, three of his helpers were ordained: Seraphim Boutaji and Michael Ka’war. These were the first Arabs to be ordained in the Diocese of Jerusalem. Also ordained was Zeller’s colleague James Jacob Huber. After 20 years in Nazareth, Zeller was transferred to Jerusalem in 1876. By that time he was considered an expert in the fields of Arabic and Muslim evangelism. This became a very important issue for the Church Mission Society in the 1870s, when it was reorganized to concentrate on evangelizing among the Muslim community. Zeller was one of the main people who trained the missionaries. In Jerusalem he took charge of the Bishop's School and founded a Preparandi Institute which was devoted to training teachers. In 1901, he realized that it was time to retire, and in the same year he left Jerusalem to go back to Germany. He died of heart failure on 19 February 1902. ==Legacy==