A Review of *Nobody's Perfect*

Nobody’s Perfect: Redefining Sin and Mistakes in Adolescent Christian Education is a gift to the field of youth ministry. Thoughtful, careful, and deeply practical, this book is essential reading for anyone who works with young people in the church—especially those who care about cultivating spaces of honesty, trust, and genuine formation rather than fear or moral performance.

This book is full of prophetic and pastoral wisdom. The authors clearly understand youth not as problems to be fixed or moral projects to be managed, but as people. Care is taken throughout the book to balance wisdom gleaned from developmental theories with a conceptual centralization of young people's lived experience. Though at times I found myself somewhat perplexed by an implicit hermeneutical capitulation to developmentalism, I was time and again relieved by the authors' pervasive and palpable concern for the real lives of young people, particularly those on the margins, and their relentless refusal to weaponize theology in ways that harm rather than heal. This alone makes the book stand out in a crowded field of youth ministry resources.

The book is also remarkably practical. Rather than lingering at the level of abstraction, it offers concrete strategies, practices, and reframings that youth ministers can actually use. Leaders looking for ways to talk about failure, growth, accountability, and responsibility without collapsing into shame-based pedagogy will find a wealth of insight here. The authors consistently demonstrate how theological reflection can—and must—shape ministerial and educational practice.

At the heart of the book is a sustained engagement with questions of sin and mistake—what the Christian tradition would name as hamartiology. In that sense, the book clearly orbits theological terrain that is both necessary and fraught. The authors’ insistence that not all mistakes are sins, and that treating every misstep as moral failure can do deep damage to young people, is not only correct but urgently needed. This distinction alone has the potential to free many young people from unnecessary guilt and shame.

And yet, it is here that the book’s greatest weakness also emerges: its lack of an explicit and fully developed hamartiology. While the distinction between “sin” and “mistake” is pastorally useful, the book often relies on this bifurcation without adequately defining either term. Sin appears to function implicitly as something a person knowingly does despite understanding it to be wrong—an action that therefore carries guilt or shame. Mistakes, by contrast, are framed as innocent missteps, often generative, even capable of producing growth, and thus not something that should be accompanied by shame or guilt.

These working definitions are not without merit, but they remain underdeveloped and largely untheorized. Given how central these concepts are to the book’s argument, a deeper theological exploration would have strengthened the project significantly. Questions about the definitions of sin thoroughout the history of theology that do incorporate nuanced tragic elements (i.e. Tillich) of sin that may actually resonate with the concept of "mistake" are largely left unexamined. The result is a framework that works well pedagogically but feels at times theoretically and theologically thin. 

But this book more than overcomes its shortcomings with its pastoral depth and wisdom. If anything, the book's shortcomings invite further conversation and deeper reflection—something good theological work should always do. Nobody’s Perfect succeeds not because it offers a final word on sin and mistakes, but because it reorients youth ministry away from fear and toward trust, away from control and toward care.

For anyone engaged in youth ministry, Christian education, or pastoral leadership more broadly, this book is both a challenge and an encouragement. It calls leaders to take young people seriously, to think carefully about the language we use, and to create communities where growth is possible precisely because grace is real. That alone makes it a book well worth reading—and returning to.