Lessons from ‘He Gets Us’

‘He Gets Us’ is a US ad campaign spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prompt faith conversations in America.

It also seeks to lead interested enquirers to do Bible reading programmes and to connect with local Alpha groups. Their most prominent advertisement to date was their 60-second Superbowl commercial, ‘Foot Washing’, re-imagining John 13 with various representatives of polarised groups washing one another’s feet. It finished with the line ‘Jesus didn’t preach hate. Jesus washed feet.’

As with any large-scale initiative, it has attracted criticism – for its expense, for its use of ‘pre-evangelism’ (rather than out-and-out gospel presentations), and for its perceived taking of sides in the culture wars. Interestingly, criticism seems split between those who think it’s a Trojan horse for right-wing conservatism and those who think it’s rank ‘wokery’. But what are the lessons for our own experience of everyday evangelism? Three things.

1. Show them Jesus.

This is what the campaign does well. They strike a brilliantly subversive tone, and show a surprising Jesus– a Jesus who can make the world sit up and listen. If you’re searching online, you can find their ads like ‘The Rebel’ or ‘That Day’ in which they defamiliarise us with the Jesus story by presenting it in a modern frame.

When He’s shown to us as a revolutionary, or a victim of injustice, or a foot washer, we’re forced to do a ‘double take’. If this is what God is like, I need to rethink.

In personal evangelism, this is vital. Whenever I’m asked a thorny question, my response is: ‘Yeah, tricky isn’t it? But what do you make of Jesus?’ He is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15). If we want people to know God, show Jesus.

But then…

2. When you show them Jesus, you’re showing them God.

It’s God who was walking around Israel 2,000 years ago. Yes, according to His human nature, but it’s the person of God the Son who shows up to a wedding in Cana, who overturns the money-changers’ tables, and who stoops to the filthy feet of His followers.

Everything in John 13 is screaming at us: this is what God is like. Almost the last thing Jesus says in John 12 and almost the first thing he says in John 14 is that if we see Jesus, we’re seeing God (John 12:45; 14:7). His stooping and serving is not a departure from His deity, it’s an expression of it.

But if we present something like the foot washing as merely a fresh vision for humanity, people will feel – and people have felt – moralised rather than evangelised.

Here’s my third point, and it’s another (friendly!) critique for ‘He Gets Us’.

3. When you invite them to Jesus you’re inviting them to church.

The first message you receive when you visit the ‘He Gets Us’ website is a bold question: How did the story of Jesus, the world’s greatest love story, get twisted into a tool to judge, harm, and divide?

I understand the impulse but, as a first move – one that frames the whole campaign – I think this is misguided. Would Coca Cola’s ad agency begin their website: ‘How did the sweet, refreshing goodness of Coca Cola become associated with a drink that rots your teeth?’ Unlikely. But much evangelism makes the same self-destructive move.

We all must navigate the awful truth that Christ’s people have practiced great evil in the world. But we should also remember that the church is the bride of Christ and we are His mission strategy to the world. If we distance ourselves from church, we shouldn’t be surprised if the world does as well.

In the US, 40million Americans have ‘de-churched’ this century. 30 million of those have done so for pragmatic reasons like ‘we moved’ or ‘attendance was inconvenient’. If our evangelism is heard to be ‘rescuing Jesus from the clutches of institutional Christianity’, that trend towards de-churching will only continue.

So lift up Jesus; surprise people with the God He reveals; and speak warmly and wisely of church. Next time we’ll consider how.