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.