Ian Paisley and had been an instrumental party in the Good Friday Agreement. In 2007, following the St Andrews Agreement, the DUP finally agreed to share power with republican party Sinn Féin and consent to all-Ireland governance in certain matters. Paisley and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness became First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively in May 2007. He stepped down as First Minister and DUP leader in mid-2008, and left politics in 2011. Paisley was made a life peer in 2010 as Baron Bannside. Ian Richard Kyle Paisley was born in Armagh, County Armagh, and brought up in the town of Ballymena,
John Church (minister) John Church (minister) John Church (1780 – c. 1835) was an Independent minister who was most famous for his involvement in the homosexual scandal of the Vere Street Coterie. He is often claimed as the first openly gay ordained Christian minister in England. Contemporary rumours about this are unproveable one way or the other, though circumstantial evidence may suggest that his "inordinate affections which led me into error" can be equated with homosexual inclinations. A foundling discovered as a toddler barely able to walk on the steps of St John's Church Clerkenwell (hence his name) or St Andrew's Church Holborn,