Vulnerability, Discipleship and Community

“Are you enough?” asked Sara Gerritsma De Moor, guest for the Dordt College’s First Mondays Speakers Series on Monday, October 6. The shame we live in and process life through not only damages our ability to love God and love others, but it also effects our ability to truly love ourselves. We are troubled, therefore, when we continually ask ourselves if we are enough. Am I smart enough? Am I skinny enough? Am I good enough? Under the definition of shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging,” Gerritsma De Moor urged the audience to move beyond a living a life in shame to a life of being vulnerable.

Vulnerability is neither always good nor always bad, Gerritsma De Moor proclaimed. “I’m not saying that embracing vulnerability is always comfortable – far from it. It is often scary. But it is reality. We are created by God with feelings. It may be more or less socially acceptable for us to express our feelings, or to let it be known that we HAVE feelings, depending on our gender, age, social position and the like, but this doesn’t negate the creational reality: we are created with emotions. We cannot escape the reality that we are vulnerable. Instead, vulnerability sounds like truth, and feels like courage.”

Sara Gerritsma DeMoor is a 2006 graduate from Dordt College where she earned a degree in political science. Following graduation, she attended the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and completed an M.A. in philosophy. She became involved in Christian Reformed Campus Ministry at the University of Toronto as an intern. To her surprise, she discovered that she was more interested in ministry with graduate students than further academic studies. Today, Gerritsma DeMoor is in her 8th year of chaplaincy as one member of a four-person team of CRC campus pastors at the University of Toronto and remains grateful for the opportunity to witness the Spirit at work in the university context. Gerritsma DeMoor also serves as a member of the Christian Reformed Board of Home Missions and is on the Executive Committee of the Christian Reformed Campus Ministry Association. She has been published in Christian Courier, and as a “Millennial,” she remains interested in the trends, struggles, and joys of that generation’s connections to faith and church.

In all things invites our readers to listen further to Sara Gerritsma De Moor’s lecture entitled “Vulnerability, Discipleship and Community: Embracing Risk and Flourishing Together” below.