Bible Sunday celebration is held at Friends’ School Lisburn

Each year all those leaving Year 14 are invited to be presented with a Bible to mark their time as pupils of Friends’

School.

The Bibles, inscribed with a Friends’ School crest, are given to the School by the Outreach and Ministry Committee of Ulster Quarterly Meeting and, for successive generations of leavers, form a lasting link with Friends’ School.

The speaker at Bible Sunday on May 25 was Kathi Perry and the prayers were led by Simon Lamb, of Richhill Meeting.

Kathi is an American Friend, who moved to Ireland from California some twelve years ago to work with the Evangelical Friends Mission.

Now based in Greystones, Kathi undertakes local community work, running a number of family groups.

Kathi spoke to the young people about her own life, looking back to how, when she was fifteen, she went with a youth group to do voluntary work in Mexico and had then decided that she would follow wherever she felt God wanted her to go.

Trained as a teacher and a social worker, Kathi said that she would never have imagined, when she was the age of the young people she was addressing, that she would come to live in Ireland and do the work that she was.

Kathi spoke about the ‘trophic cascade’, using the example of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 to demonstrate how a small change could have a massive impact right across the ecosystem and to illustrate the many ways she felt God worked across the world.

Kathi urged the young people present to work for change, to follow their words on the Friends’ School crest and ‘Seek the things that are above’ as they moved on beyond School.

Bible Sunday concluded with supper for leavers and their families in the Dining Hall.

There was a strong sense of the friendships made over the years and, as the young people looked forward to the end of their A level exams and to moving on to university, of the lasting links that they will have with the community of Friends’ School.