Thanks for the great comments, the contest is over. You guys are insanely creative and I really appreciate you sharing all these ideas.
I want to be honest with you, I keep waiting for Zondervan, the publisher of the Stuff Christians Like book, to tell me “NO.”
They’ve been really cool to me during this whole process, but I came to this experience expecting them to play it safe. I mean, they print the Bible after all. Every morning when I read it I see “Zondervan” on the spine and the thought of the Stuff Christians Like book rolling down the same conveyor belt as the Bible is mind blowing to me.
So I keep expecting Zondervan to say no to all the crazy ideas I am telling them. But they aren’t. At all. Not even a little bit.
When I suggested we open the book with what is easily the most over the top sentence I’ve ever written, they didn’t bat an eye.
When I amplified the funny as hard as I could, they didn’t pull me back, they asked me to lean into it even harder.
When I told them I used to exaggerate the strength of my relationship with Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller because I wanted to look cool in front of other Christians and therefore thought it would be hilarious if he endorsed my book on the back cover by simply saying, “I don’t know Jon Acuff nearly as well as he likes to tell people I do.” They didn’t say “bad idea.” They laughed and said, “Let’s do that.”
At every turn, they have blown up my expectations, adding awesomeness in so many ways. And then last week they called me with a new idea.
“What if we maybe created an iPhone app for Stuff Christians Like?”
I laughed until I realized they were actually considering that, then I kicked a river birch out of excitement (It’s an old trick I learned from Van Damme’s movie “Bloodsport”) and then I said, “Let’s ask the readers what they would want.”
So that’s the topic of discussion. If you were going to design an iPhone app for Stuff Christians Like, what would it do?
Would it be a way to access and organize and play around with all the posts on this site?
Would it be some kind of game that tells you how to maneuver through the hilarious aspects of Christian culture? (e.g. Here’s how to give a side hug.)
Would it be something completely different?
I would love to hear your ideas.
The best 3 comments/ideas will get a copy of Shane Hipp’s book, “Flickering Pixels.”
Enter comments until Sunday, May 24 for a chance to win.
So, if we got to create a Stuff Christians Like iPhone app, what would it be like?
(Doesn’t matter if you don’t own an iPhone or have ever used an app. Get creative, get crazy, get raspberry beret. Just seemed like that last sentence was becoming a Prince lyric so I went ahead and finished it that way.)
