 Johnson noted in a 1752 letter to Benjamin Franklin that he had “the great Satisfaction to see some of them in the first pulpits not only in Connecticut but also in Boston and York and others in some of the first places in the Land.”

Johnson "new-model" college reforms also spread quickly.Rhode Island College (now Brown University) opened in 1764 as a non-denominational college in the "new-model" style not far from where Johnson took philosophical walks with Berkeley.In 1774, members of the board of trustees of the College of William and Mary, including Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Jefferson, Peyton Randolph, George Wythe, and Thomas Nelson, Jr., men who would soon pass "Lee's Resolution" and the "Declaration of Independence", proposed to reform the college on the "new-model" plan of Johnson, Franklin and Smith, which they finally accomplished in 1777.