All Saints Church - John Ridge (1619)
John Ridge was an English Puritan. He was at St John's College Cambridge, being ordained priest in 1612. He was appointed vicar of All Saints, Antrim in 1619. Robert Blair described him, "As he was in his carriage, so in his doctrine, grave, calm, sweet, ordinarily pressing some weighty important point to good purpose."
Ridge was at the centre of the Six Mile Water Revival of 1625. Ridge suggested that a monthly lecture meeting should be established in Antrim for those recently converted. He wanted the faith of the new converts to be grounded, "and that emotionalism might not be dominant in their spiritual experience." The main ministers involved in the revival would meet together before the lecture day and remain afterwards to discuss the progress of the revival. This monthly meeting was therefore a Bible School and in all but name, a Presbytery.
After Ridge was suspended by the Bishop of Down, he went to Irvine in Scotland.
John Livingston wrote the following:
Mr John Ridge, an Englishman, minister at Antrim. He used not to have many points in his sermon, but those he had he so enlarged and urged again and again, that it was hardly possible for any hearer to forget his preaching. He was a great urger of charitable works and a very humble man. I heard him once say, his tongue or his pen never gave him leave to call an honest minister brother. He said, also, he was once in a part in England where he wearied exceedingly, because he could not find in it any object of outward charity. Being deposed by the Bishop of Down, as others were, for his nonconformity, he came over to Irvine, where he died.