Iconoculture: "Bono Fide Worship"

Hey, look, we're featured on Iconoculture! If you don't know who they are, they say of themselves: "Iconoculture is the leader in consumer trend research and advisory services, harnessing cultural trend information about consumers and their lifestyles in order to get you even closer to your consumer. Iconoculture builds a springboard to understand what consumers will do next. We scan American culture from every angle, getting in up to our necks to decode the wants, needs, and desires driving consumer culture."

They see Get Up Off Your Knees as a useful example of what they call a "Macrotrend: Soul Searching." Most of the info they have about the book is accurate enough, although they haven't noticed the blog and they unfortuntately claim in error that there are no Roman Catholics among the authors.

And of course, being who they are, they have some applications for advertisers: "Product/Brand: Join forces with a cool icon of popular culture on a cause you both support (human rights, the environment, healthy living) and bundle your joint wisdom in a book or CD to raise awareness. Promotion/Event: Connect with teens on a deeper, more spiritual level by using words, themes, and imagery from popular culture and music in your advertising."

I suppose I should add this: I'm not at all into changing the Gospel to please listeners, but I am very much into Incarnation, being authentically part of your location and culture. And although I never did get around to reading The Future Ain't What It Used to Be by two of Iconoculture's principals (tho I did read the similarly named Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be by one of our sermon writers Brian Walsh, with J. Richard Middleton), I used to have Iconoculture in my bookmarks back in maybe 1998 or 99 when I was first trying to learn how to preach and lead in a way that connected with the culture. Like most of my peers, I had been thoroughly trained to maintain a "learned" distance from culture and to present the Gospel in a way that answered questions people weren't asking. I'd invested a decade of my life in removing myself from the real world, and Iconoculture was a help in teaching myself to notice it again. So seeing Get Up Off Your Knees cited there is pretty nice for me.