"He Gets Us" and other things the Church doesn't get

Thoughts on the new billion dollar ad campaign to re-image Jesus

This post contains the full comments provided to CNN for their article “The truth behind the ‘He Gets Us’ ads for Jesus airing during the Super Bowl.”

---

Q: It feels like we get campaigns like "He Gets Us" every once in a while, that are intended to appeal to younger people and present Christianity as "cool" while not really addressing the hard parts. When you see a campaign like this, what is your first thought? Do you see any red flags? Do you think campaigns like this can work and be good for the faith?

Christian evangelical mass marketing campaigns have historically spent millions—and now, billions—of dollars attempting to solve problems that often don’t exist.

Jesus doesn’t have an image problem, but Christians and their churches do.

The young people I work with are cool with Jesus; they are not cool with his church.

From my vantage point as an Exennial, the “He Gets Us” is a Boomer/GenX method of solving a Millennial/GenZ problem, and the ROI is likely to be low.

These campaigns end up being PR for the wrong problem. One of the primary issues young people have with Evangelicalism (and the modern church in America) is the amount of money spent on itself.

Young people are savvy. They are digital natives who understand the difference between slick marketing and authenticity. Megachurches, mega-events, and mega spending on marketing is seen as money that could have been used to fund community programs, advocacy for the oppressed—such as refugees, LGBTQ+ individuals, abortion rights—and the poor.

This will be seen by the target audience (GenZ) as an egregious waste of money, and it will push them further away from the church and ultimately Jesus.

Can campaigns like this work and be good for the faith?

I don’t want to say no, because I believe that all things done in good faith—and I have no reason to assume this campaign isn’t done in good faith—return some good. But I believe, ultimately, that the primary good that comes from these types of campaigns is a sense of moral satisfaction from those already within the walls of churches.

They amount to preaching to the choir.

These campaigns satiate the Christians’ sense of having done something, yet when all is said and done they will have done little.

Christians tend to justify such lackluster evangelism results by saying, “a seed was planted.”

Perhaps, but at what cost?

Q. Young people are "abandoning" organized religion in record numbers. What kind of complexities and issues do you think Christianity is avoiding that has contributed to this trend? What do young people want in their church?

The prevailing stats indicate that up to 80% of adolescents walk away from faith/church in the transition to adulthood. Previous generations saw a high percentage of young people return to the church when they began having children, but Millennials and GenZ are not returning with their children.

Churches are scared.

Their adult attendance was already in decline year-over-year for decades, and COVID decimated many congregations when a high percentage of congregants never returned after the doors reopened.

The problem is—and my doctoral research dove into this—churches have had broken systems for decades. They bought into the idea that kids needed doctrine, teaching, and apologetics to build their faith. Problematically, that indoctrination never connected with their heart or their hands. So we now have generations of people who grew up in church and learned a lot about faith but never owned their own faith. They had never practiced it or lived it out.

So these students go to college, see non-Christians doing the things Christians should have been doing in their home churches—feeding the homeless, advocating for the oppressed, fighting for equal rights—and they realize that their church-of-origin said a lot of good things but never actually lived them out.

The saw that the world was living the call of Jesus better than their Evangelical church back home.

That hypocrisy wounded them in ways the church cannot hope to heal without admitting the reality of the situation, owning its effects, and fixing the root problems.

Instead, churches continue to build bigger buildings and buy larger ad campaigns.

Young people want a church that will do a capital campaign for a homeless shelter.

Young people want a church that will protest for Reproductive Rights.

Young people want a church that will put a float in a Pride Parade.

Young people want a church that has more questions than answers.

Young people want a church that has more meals than lectures.

Young people want a church that has more apologies than theologies.

Young people want a church that will put shoe leather to their faith and DO something for those in harm’s way… those who the church itself has harmed.

Q. The Evangelical influence on "He Gets Us" is pretty obvious, and while the campaign avoids disclosing any kind of affiliation, they uphold the tenets of the Lausanne Covenant. Are you familiar with this document? If so, what's your read on it, as a biblical scholar?

I am not an expert on Lausanne—a 1974 religious manifesto, led by Billy Graham and John Stott, which promoted active worldwide Christian evangelism and is broadly considered one of the most influential documents in modern evangelicalism—but I don’t believe that the document could have been written or broadly supported by Evangelicalism today.

Frankly, so much changed after it was written, that I’m not certain it could have been written or supported by the late 70s/ early 80s.

Evangelicalism was once a ‘big tent’ movement that worked to build broad consensus on four primary theologies—salvation, the cross, the authority of the Bible, and social action)—and allow for differing opinions on secondary theological issues. But with the rise of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right, those secondary issues—like abortion, LGBTQ+, race relations—became first order issues that began to push the four core tenets into secondary space.

Today, Evangelicalism is fracturing apart because secondary issues are now the litmus test for orthodoxy. The Lausanne Covenant (1974) has essentially been replaced by more toxic and ideological documents that are dividing the people Lausanne once brought together. For example:

• The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978)

• The Danvers Statement on gender roles (1988)

• The Nashville Statement on human sexuality and gender roles (2017)

• The Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospels (2018)

Q. Finally, are you seeing any kind of conversations, either among lay people or faith leaders, about "He Gets Us?"

I straddle two communities: traditional Evangelicalism—where I try to speak truth as something of a prophetic voice—and the margins of outside of Evangelicalism.

I work among those who have walked away or been wounded by the church but still want to have a relationship with Jesus.

Among those who are outside of the church, I have heard no conversation or commentary about the “He Gets Us” campaign… yet. With a ad spending stretching into the billions, that will change.

Within Evangelicalism—especially far right pastors and leaders—I’ve heard a lot of conversation, and none of it is positive. The primary concern is that “He Gets Us” is too big a tent for their comfort level.

There seems to be concern that people who connect to the info line will be connected to churches that are middle of the road, progressive, or liberal.

Conservative pastors judge this by the only real litmus test that matters within Conservatism right now: LGBTQ+ rights.

I know specific pastors who connected with a “He Gets Us” operator, pretended to be in need of church, lied about their sexuality, and then publicly took “He Gets Us” to task for having the audacity to connect a “gay person” with an area church that was affirming.

Sadly, it seems that a group of rich evangelicals funded “He Gets Us,” then used it as leverage in a culture war that they are fighting among themselves.