“John responded, ‘Master, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he does not follow us.’ ‘Don’t stop him,’ Jesus told him, ‘because whoever is not against you is for you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a culture that is increasingly turning against the Christian faith. The level of tolerance the church receives as an institution is dropping like a stone in some places. There are still pockets where things haven’t changed very much from where they were 50 years ago (I happen to live in one and love it), but there are others where the people in power seem dead set on railroading the church out of existence. In Finland, there is an ongoing case whose outcome will determine whether or not reading certain verses from the Scriptures is considered hate speech. In the face of such a cultural tide, the internal unity of the church becomes all the more important. Big, public fights within the church stemming from differences of opinion on whether or not something is a first-tier issue on which we must plant our flag or a second- or third-tier matter where a bit more diversity of views can be tolerated do not help us. In the wake of the recent Super Bowl 58, we have seen exactly that kind of a debate unfold. Let’s talk today for a few minutes about the He Gets Us campaign debate.

In 2022, a series of ads began running in high profile locations across the country, most notably during the Super Bowl. Those initial advertisements caused quite a splash. They were pretty effective too. Their production values were high. They were designed to give people just enough of a picture to get them interested, but not so much that they didn’t have to go dig a little deeper on the campaign’s website to find out more. And, as you might suspect, they started generating controversy almost immediately.

The initial criticisms came from the cultural, political, and even the religious left. These criticisms, unsurprisingly, weren’t focused on the substance of the ads so much as the political and cultural stances of the mysterious group providing their funding. Although most of the group has managed to remain anonymous, some journalistic digging discovered that the Green family of Hobby Lobby fame was among the financial backers. This caused quite a stir because even though these ads were really effective at presenting Jesus in a way that even the most progressive-minded nonbelievers found intriguing, the people funding them had supported groups and causes that were identified as anti-LGBT which meant there must be some kind of a nefarious purpose behind them.

Yet the campaign persisted.

As the ads continued to appear in more and more locations where they were seen by tens of millions of Americans, the interest in them – and the criticisms they attracted – grew and diversified. Whereas groups from the left had been attacking them from the beginning because their founders weren’t sufficiently progressive, groups from the cultural, political, but especially the religious right began attacking them because they were far too progressive. They were presenting a Jesus who seemed designed to appeal to progressive-minded people and since those people are the enemy, they must be stopped.

Then came the complaints about money. These criticisms came mostly from the left. The ads continue to be really well-produced. That’s not cheap. What’s more, they continue to run in incredibly high-profile locations. This year’s Super Bowl featured not one but two ads from the campaign. A 30-second advertisement in Super Bowl 58 cost $7 million. That’s $14 million spent to put their ads in one television event. Over the course of the campaign so far, the donors have spent multiple hundreds of millions of dollars on their effort to get people talking about and interested in Jesus. That kind of money could have been used for other, more direct Gospel-advancing or poverty-fighting or church-building purposes. The apostle Judas would be nodding his head in agreement here.

Not wanting to be left out, the critics on the right spoke up again. The campaign presents an incomplete image of the Gospel. The ads don’t talk about sin or salvation. They ignore the Gospel insistence that people have to be transformed from how they are in order to be right with God. Nowhere is the hard truth that Jesus is the only way to get to God. Conversion and sanctification are not even hinted at. They make Jesus too much like us; He’s all human and no God. We don’t need for Jesus to be like us, we need to be like Him.

So, what should we make of all of this? My first reaction is that the devil will use whatever he can in order to discredit or otherwise take down a sincere attempt to point people in the direction of Jesus. I’m not saying that none of this criticism has any merit. Some of the critics have made valid points about the drawbacks and challenges of this particular ad campaign, especially those whose criticisms come out of a place of thoughtful theological reflection on it. That being said, I think all of these various criticisms, but especially the more recent ones coming from the theological and political right are little more than exercises in missing the point.

Now, before I go any further here, let me clarify something as a matter of full disclosure. I am a pastoral partner of the campaign. I don’t make a dime from that association and never will. No one from the campaign has even thought about approaching me to write a defense of their efforts, nor do I suspect they will. What this means is that when someone goes to the He Gets Us website and asks about being connected with a church, if they are within a range of 50 or so miles of where my church is located, their request comes to me. I then have the opportunity if they so desire to engage with them about what they have going on in their life and to encourage them in the direction of connecting with a church in their local community. Many aren’t interested in that. They just want to know someone is there to respond if they want. On several occasions, though, I have been able to point people in the direction of real help. Whether or not they’ve taken up that help is up to them.

As for the campaign itself, its goal is pretty simple. It aims to get people who haven’t thought much about Jesus before interested enough to want to learn more. On their website, they have a variety of tools aimed at helping them in that direction. That’s it. That’s the point of all these ads and all this money. It’s all about getting people interested in wanting to know more about who Jesus is. It’s not about offering up a robust, orthodox theology. It’s not about making a full Gospel presentation. It’s not about convicting people of their sin. It’s definitely not about getting into the weeds of the variety of issues about which there is a robust debate among believers. None of that. It’s just about getting people interested in Jesus.

The approach they take comes out of a couple of realities. The first is that the church has often done a poor job of representing Jesus to the culture. That’s not at all to say we’ve done everything wrong, because we haven’t. But the cultural narrative around the church these days isn’t good. We are far more often known for the things we oppose than what we support. We have often done a very good job of convincing people Jesus wouldn’t want anything to do with them because of this or that issue of sin or politics. They may like the idea of Jesus, but we so often wrap Him in a blanket of judgment and condemnation that they have decided they are better off staying away entirely. These ads are about stripping away those layers in order to say to folks who mostly inhabit the secular, progressive left of our culture, “Jesus really is someone worth your time and attention.” It is to say to people who are struggling under the weight of the brokenness of the culture around them that Jesus understands their frustration. He gets them. And, if He gets them, then perhaps it would be worth their time to get Him more.

What all of this is pre-evangelism. This is about breaking up the ground of a hard heart in order that Gospel seeds can be planted successfully. These kinds of efforts don’t often lead directly to salvation decisions. Rather, they make those later decisions more likely than they were before. Pre-evangelism isn’t really something the church has had to do in quite a while because of just how thoroughly the Christian worldview shaped our culture over the past century. Because of that, many folks for whom evangelism is a great passion don’t understand its point or worth. People who know nothing about Jesus or who have a whole library of wrong thoughts about Him aren’t going to be interested in the Gospel until those thoughts have been corrected. That takes time and effort. It takes pre-evangelism. Apologetics is one form of pre-evangelism, but so are efforts like the He Gets Us campaign.

Getting people thinking about Jesus is a good and noble goal. That is by no means all someone needs to be saved, but they probably aren’t going to be saved without that as a starting point. Because of this, the He Gets Us campaign is worthwhile. It’s not perfect, but no such effort is. Rather than squabbling about things that would justify many of the complaints about Christians and the church in the hearts and minds of the watching world, we would do better to use our time to join in their efforts and show the lost and broken world around us why Jesus really is worth their time and attention.