Nobody's Perfect : Redefining Sin and Mistakes in Adolescent Christian Education

Adolescents, like everyone else, make mistakes. However, religious educators Cynthia L. Cameron, Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, and Emily A. Peck argue that some youths are born with the privilege of making mistakes in ways that others often are not. They also argue that many Christian education practices that guide our understandings of mistake-making are shaped by gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, and race in ways that disenfranchise some adolescents.

In response, Cameron, Lockhart-Rusch, and Peck curate a much-needed conversation that helps religious educators accompany adolescents and better understand mistakes based on a theological framework that names adolescents as fundamentally good. The result is an edited volume that explores ways educators can walk with adolescents so that youth can learn from their mistakes and grow without misunderstanding all mistakes as sin. Together, these essays seed a theology of adolescent goodness that's rooted in a liberative Christian theological anthropology.

Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative research, Nobody's Perfect offers nuanced and robust definitions of what a mistake is, apart from definitions of sin. The book also explores the challenges of talking about mistake-making and sin with adolescents within religious institutional contexts that shape policy, pastoral practice, and ministry orientations. Finally, the book presents youths' own voices about how they understand and process what mistake-making looks like in the contexts in which they live and learn.

Nobody's Perfect is for Christian educators who serve either in the academy or in congregational settings. The book well serves educators who recognize the various cultural and developmental challenges adolescents face when their church communities. The book also offers tools to help such church leaders attend to religious education spaces with a renewed theology that can root a more liberative experience of religious education.

Cynthia L. Cameron holds the Patrick and Barbara Keenan Chair in Religious Education and is Assistant Professor of Religious Education at the Regis St. Michael's Faculty of Theology at the University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on female adolescence, theological anthropology, and Catholic schools.

Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch is assistant professor of Christian Education at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Her research interests are in religious education; practical, liberation, and womanist theologies; embodied faith and pedagogies; theopoetics; and creativity, imagination, and play.

Emily A. Peck is visiting assistant professor of Christian Formation and Young Adult Ministries at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. She is also the cocreator of the Wesley Innovation Hub and codirector of the Children and Youth Ministry and Advocacy certificate program.