Leadership Journal

The Oracle of Delphi does Wall Street-that may best describe the work of Faith Popcorn.

From her 28th-floor Manhattan office, she makes her living peering into the future of pop culture and selling her best judgments to Fortune 500 companies, including American Express, Eastman Kodak, IBM, and Procter & Gamble. Fortune magazine recently explained, "Popcorn has never claimed to be a scientist. In fact, the main point of her work is that it's intuitive, visceral, and touchy-feely."

In the late seventies, Popcorn presciently coined the term cocooning Americans retreating to "haven at home-drawing their shades, plumping their pillows, clutching their remotes." She also came up with the phrase cashing out to describe the phenomenon of "cashing in the career chips you've been stacking up all these years, and going somewhere else to work at something you want to do, the way you want to do it."

Founder and president of BrainReserve, she has written the best-selling The Popcorn Report and, with Lys Marigold, Clicking. Popcorn certainly has no particular interest in Christianity ("I'm 100 percent Jewish," she says; "I don't believe in Jesus Christ the way Christians do, that he was God"), but she knows well the culture Christians want to reach.

To find out where culture is headed, Leadership consulting editor Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and senior associate editor Dave Goetz visited Popcorn in her office on 1 Madison Avenue. She was amazingly candid about the disillusionment she has observed in our culture and the resulting opportunities for the church.

The Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News & World Report recently ran cover stories on churches and religion. Why are the media paying more attention to religion?

Popcorn: The press is simply people (though sometimes they don't act like it). They are just responding to what interests them and what interests their audience. But the interest relates to the Anchoring Trend, which is the trend of spirituality.
I don't know much about the churches you're involved in, but in the mega-churches, people are looking for community, not just a church. Which seems counterintuitive. You would think a larger church provides less intimacy.
It's like a village rather than a church.

What will that mean for the smaller church?

I would compare it to retailing. Take Price Club, the megastore. People like to go there and end up buying more than they thought they needed. On the other hand, there is the trend toward intimate, tiny boutiques, bakeries, candy stores-you need that.

So there's a place for both big and small.

I think so, but nothing in the middle. The middle will probably fall out. The extremes will grow.

To understand the culture, what sort of questions do you ask?

In my seminars, I say, "Don't ask this question of anybody you live with, but ask people, 'Are you happy?' " Most people will tell you, "Not really." People, in general, are not too happy. That's an especially great question ...