Charged with spreading the Anglican church in the colony, he formed parishes and opened house churches throughout the colony, which he then staffed with his disciples, who then built churches in the town. He founded 25 churches in the Colony by 1752, for which he has been called "The Father of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut". Beginning in the 1730s, he participated in a long running pamphlet war with New England Puritans. "Johnson willingly and enthusiastically defended his beliefs in a series of three pamphlets" titled "Letters to His Dissenting Parishioners" (1733–37), and in the next decade, was attacked and counter-attacked his greatest Puritan antagonist, the President of Princeton Jonathan Dickinson, in a series of pamphlets titled "Aristocles to Authades "(1745–57).