As a performative pastor, Bolz-Weber might seem New Age, but her ministry is actually focused on something old school: sin. It’s a somewhat surprising bent for a mainline pastor—and a thought-provoking model for churches that have been bleeding young people for more than a decade.

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“Sometimes I can be an asshole, but it’s almost as though I can hear Jesus saying”—here, Bolz-Weber cleared her throat a little and moved her voice one half-step lower, perhaps trying to imitate bro-Jesus—“‘uh, that’s okay, it’s not that I, like, love you and claim you despite that. I love you and claim you because of that.’”

Perfectionism is deeply embedded in American Christianity. The Puritans performed piety in hopes of being part of God’s chosen elect, and their efforts were followed by three centuries of purity balls and pushes for temperance and church culture that revels in polish. At the church she planted in 2008, The House for All Sinners and Saints, Bolz-Weber has upended many stereotypes about Christianity; the church is open to gays and lesbians and atheists alike. But she’s especially committed to defying the assumption that church is for people who have it together.

“We have this socially progressive church, all these queer people, everyone’s welcome,” she said. “And you know what we have in our liturgy every Sunday? Confession and absolution. Let us confess that God is God and we are not.”

The cast of real-life sinners she describes in her book are diverse: the Sandy Hook shooter, kids who committed suicide, a grieving pastor who drank a little too much and accidentally killed a woman with his car. These are the sins of life and death; it’s easy to look at people like this and feel judgmental. But Bolz-Weber counts herself among them; her sins are of a different scale, but she names them with equal parts relish and remorse. In her theology, just as Adam Lanza needs forgiveness, so does she.

“I don’t want to be in bondage to the fact that I can be an asshole,” she said. “So for me, the best path toward some sort of freedom from being absolutely bound to it is to admit that I need grace.”

In no sense has Bolz-Weber claimed to reinvent Christianity, magically discovering the secret of sin and forgiveness that’s preached endlessly in the Bible. For her, it’s more that this idea is often obscured in delivery.

“There’s a cultural wrapping around a lot of mainline Protestantism where the church has confused the gifts and the wrapping,” she said. “The sort of slight formality and nicey-nice chit-chat and dressing up a little and not going too deep, but just being nice, good people who do some volunteer hours.”

Even though she’s part of a progressive, mainline Lutheran denomination, with this particular jab, Bolz-Weber sounds a lot like many American conservatives and evangelicals. Mainline Protestantism is dying, it’s sometimes said, for exactly this reason: It’s Christian identity, not Christian theology. But both mainline and evangelical traditions have reason to worry about losing Millennials, she said. Young people are “either passively consuming a mediocre rock concert”—as in the amphitheater environs of most American megachurches—“or passively consuming a formal liturgy, instead of being a community of creators.”