 He was ordained at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1637, and "having carried a good number of planters with him into the woods", became the first minister in Musketaquid, later named Concord.He was "noted even among Puritans for the superlative stiffness of his Puritanism".In March 1638 during the Antinomian Controversy, he was one of the ministers who sat during the church trial of Anne Hutchinson, which resulted in her excommunication from the Boston church.