He became a minister in 1946, and then founded the Free Presbyterian Church in 1951; he remained its leader until 2008. Paisley first became politically active in the 1960s and was elected to the Northern Irish parliament (1970–72) and the House of Commons in London (1970–85; 1986–2010). A co-founder of the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (1972), he was an outspoken defender of the Protestant Unionist position in Northern Ireland. Paisley was a Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 2004. From 1998 he was a vocal opponent of most aspects of the Good Friday Agreement; however, he became a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly it established. In 2007 he agreed to take his party into a power-sharing executive with Sinn Fein and became First Minister of Northern Ireland. He resigned in 2008.