There is a particular kind of invitation that changes the temperature of a room. Not a lecture from the front. Not a debate staged for points. More like the quiet moment when someone says, “Have you ever actually listened to his story?”
That is the posture behind He Gets Us. It is a Christian campaign that invites people to consider Jesus, his life, and his teachings, and to notice why he matters. The campaign’s own framing is simple: share stories about Jesus in unexpected places so curiosity and conversation can begin. It began in 2021 as a response https://stephenldzm915.cavandoragh.org/he-gets-us-jesus-in-public-life-and-private-struggles to loneliness, division, and anxiety, which tells you something about what the people behind it are trying to address, even before you ever see an ad.
You might encounter it in the kinds of places that do not usually feel like church. And you might notice it because it is hard to miss. The campaign has been widely associated with major cultural advertising, including Super Bowl ads in 2023 and 2024. Whether that makes you hopeful or suspicious depends on your background. But it does make one thing clear: this is not trying to stay inside the boundaries of familiar Christian settings.
What should a thoughtful person do when a message about Jesus shows up in the middle of everyday life, and it does so with a public-facing tone? You can respect the invitation without pretending you agree with every angle. You can listen for the content without adopting the packaging. And you can ask whether the story they are pointing you toward is actually worth considering.
What “He Gets Us” is, and what it is trying not to be
One of the most useful ways to read He Gets Us is to notice its boundaries.
The campaign says it is not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint. In other words, the public-facing message is meant to stand on its own rather than be tethered to a particular faction. That matters, because many people in public life today have learned to assume that any religious messaging has a hidden agenda. The campaign explicitly tries to avoid that kind of alignment.
At the same time, it is “about Jesus,” so it is not neutral in the way a purely secular campaign would be. Jesus is the center, and Christianity is the context. Led by Come Near, Inc. as a nonprofit, with He Gets Us, LLC wholly owned and managed by Come Near, it carries the structure of an organized effort. That structure does not automatically make it good or bad, but it does mean you are not just watching a vibe. You are seeing a coordinated campaign with an intent and a message strategy.
This is important because it gives you a way to assess it without collapsing into cynicism. If you are skeptical, your critique can aim at what is being said and how. If you are open, you can focus on why Jesus’ story might meet real human needs like loneliness, division, and anxiety, especially since those are named as the starting point.
Why people feel drawn to Jesus stories, even when they do not attend church
I do not know anyone who feels neutral about Jesus. Even people who say they are not religious often have a mental file folder labeled “Jesus,” built from childhood, media, sermons they half-heard, and conversations they did not understand at the time. Some of that file folder is accurate, some of it is distorted, and some of it is simply incomplete.
When a campaign like He Gets Us reaches people outside church, it is usually not because it believes everyone is waiting for a new theological textbook. It is because many people already have the raw materials for curiosity, even if they are not looking for organized religion.
People are often open to Jesus stories for three reasons I have seen again and again in real conversations.
First, Jesus tends to feel personal. Not just “religious” in the abstract, but relational. His approach to people, his attention to outsiders, and the moral clarity of his teachings give people a sense that this is not merely about rules. It is about how you treat a person when you could choose something colder.
Second, Jesus stories offer a moral imagination. In a time when many people feel trapped between extremes, the figure of Jesus can function like a bridge. Not a compromise of truth, but a model that includes compassion, correction, and a kind of steady love that is hard to manufacture on demand.
Third, people are quietly hungry for emotional safety. The campaign itself names loneliness, division, and anxiety as the reasons it started. That aligns with what many people say when they think no one is listening: they are tired of feeling alone, tired of being at odds with their neighbors, and tired of their minds spinning even when life looks fine from the outside.
If you have ever sat with a friend after a difficult week, you know how much “I get it” means. That is the emotional hook, even if you disagree with the messaging or the methods.
Listening for the themes: love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, service
A campaign can invite you in, but it still needs content worth considering. He Gets Us states that it aims to reintroduce people to Jesus and to highlight themes such as love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
Those themes are not small. They also do not stay abstract if you try to apply them to a real life with real friction.
Love, in this context, is not sentimental. It is closer to a stance toward people who are annoying, wounded, defensive, or mean. Love is what you do when it would be easier to shut the door and label someone as beyond help.
Forgiveness is not ignoring harm. It is the harder path, the path that refuses to let revenge be the only language of justice. Many people want forgiveness to be an off switch for consequences, but forgiveness in a Jesus-centered story is more like an invitation to a different kind of accountability, one that still lets a person be restored rather than permanently crushed.
Understanding is the theme that often gets overlooked because it sounds soft. But understanding can be practical. It means you listen long enough to name what is actually happening, not just what you assume is happening. It means you notice whether someone’s fear is driving their choices, or whether their pride is.
Kindness is not weakness. It can be strategic. It can lower the temperature, and it can also make room for hard truths without turning those truths into weapons.
Service is where the whole conversation stops being just about feelings. Service asks what you will do with your attention and your time. It is one thing to agree that people need grace. It is another thing to show up in ways that cost you something.
If you keep those themes in mind while you encounter the campaign, you can separate, at least somewhat, what it is saying from how it is packaged.
Everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story, including LGBTQ+ people
A detail on He Gets Us’s FAQ matters because it speaks directly to who the invitation is for. The campaign says Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story.
For some readers, that statement is the reason they are willing to pay attention at all. It signals that the message is not meant to be limited to people who already feel socially accepted or theologically comfortable.
For others, it may raise questions about how Jesus-centered love and identity are being handled, because different people hear “welcome” and “welcome to explore” through very different lenses. Some hear it as a sincere open door. Others hear it as a bridge that might eventually pull them in a direction they are not ready for.
What is fair here is to treat it as an invitation rather than a promise of what you will agree with. You can take the message at face value and still ask for clarity about how love and truth are balanced in practice. But the existence of that FAQ statement means the campaign is not pretending that LGBTQ+ people do not matter to Jesus.
And it means that if the campaign truly wants conversation, then it needs to be conversation that does not silence anyone who brings real identity and real questions to the table.
The tension some people point to, and how to think through it carefully
Whenever a religious campaign appears in public space at high volume, criticism becomes part of the story. The campaign has faced criticism partly because of a perceived tension between its inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts.
That tension is not imaginary. It is a real kind of concern people raise, and it comes up because money and messaging often do not align cleanly. Sometimes supporters fund a broad religious effort while holding views that clash with the public tone of inclusion. Other times, people interpret inclusion statements through the knowledge they already have about donors.
If you are evaluating He Gets Us as an invitation to consider Jesus, the right response is not to either dismiss everything or swallow everything. A more careful approach is to separate at least three things in your mind:
What the campaign says it is aiming for and how it frames the invitation. What supporters do, especially when those actions conflict with the campaign’s public message. How Jesus’ story itself actually reads, in the details of compassion, forgiveness, and service.The second item is the hardest to untangle because it lives outside the campaign’s own FAQ. But you can still hold the complexity honestly. People who are excluded by some conservative causes might rightly ask whether they are truly being loved, or whether inclusion is mostly a marketing strategy.
At the same time, people who support the campaign might say, reasonably, that Jesus’ story is bigger than donor politics. The question then becomes: does the campaign’s message treat people as persons now, or does it only treat them as targets for conversion later?
There is no single answer that fits everyone. But it is possible to ask better questions.
Here is a short checklist you can use in your own assessment, without turning the whole thing into a courtroom:
- Does the campaign’s Jesus-centered themes focus on love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service in a way that feels consistent rather than selective? Does it invite dialogue, or does it mainly demand agreement? How does it handle claims of welcome, especially for groups that many Christian messages have harmed? Are there signs that the campaign is trying to reintroduce people to Jesus rather than rebrand a political posture? If you had to explain the invitation to a friend who has never been to church, would your explanation sound like a human conversation or a slogan?
That is the kind of work that turns criticism and openness into discernment.
“He gets us” is an emotional claim. Jesus is the content.
“He Gets Us” can sound like a promise of understanding, and that promise is emotionally powerful. People who feel unseen are naturally drawn to the possibility that someone actually gets them.
But if you only stay on the emotional level, you can miss what makes this campaign more than a mood. The campaign’s invitation is to consider Jesus’ story. That means the question is not simply, “Do you feel understood?” It is, “Do you find Jesus’ story worthy of serious attention?”
In my experience, that shift in question is where real growth can start. When someone says, “He gets us,” it can be a starting point for conversation. When someone says, “Consider his story,” it becomes an invitation to examine a life.
Jesus’ story, as presented in the broad Christian tradition, has a moral shape. It centers on how you treat people, especially when you are tempted to treat them as enemies. It carries a gravity that does not evaporate when times are hard. It offers a kind of courage that can survive rejection, and it refuses to reduce people to categories.
That is why the campaign’s stated themes matter. Love without kindness becomes a feeling that never moves. Forgiveness without understanding becomes an unrealistic demand. Service without love becomes reputation management. And understanding without moral direction becomes paralysis.
Jesus stories, when they land well, create a different set of incentives. They help people stop defining themselves only by grievances and start defining themselves by how they respond.
Where “unexpected places” changes the kind of conversation you have
One of the campaign’s stated ideas is that it shares stories about Jesus in unexpected places. That phrase matters because it describes a method, and methods shape conversations.
When Jesus is only ever mentioned in church contexts, people can treat him as belonging to a specific culture. They can dismiss him as irrelevant to their schedule, their questions, their work life, or their private pain.
When the message shows up outside those settings, it pressures people to engage him without the usual gatekeeping. That can be a gift. It can also be frustrating if you see it as publicity rather than invitation.
The best way to respond to unexpected public messaging is to treat it like a billboard you can choose to walk past. You do not have to let the medium dictate your judgment of the message. If you are curious, follow the thread. If you are not, you can still say, “I hear that Jesus matters to people, and I do not have to join the campaign to respect that.”
This approach protects you from two common traps. One trap is refusing to listen because you dislike the packaging. The other trap is accepting the message automatically because you like the tone. Good discernment requires both skepticism and openness, held in balance.
How to engage the invitation without pretending you are someone else
A lot of people want permission to engage Jesus without performing a version of themselves that is convenient. The campaign’s inclusive statements, especially about welcome and Jesus’ love for LGBTQ+ people, are designed to provide some permission. But permission still does not remove the need for honesty.
If you do not believe yet, you can still examine what Jesus teaches and why followers have found it compelling. If you have been hurt by Christian behavior, you can still ask what Jesus himself emphasized, as distinct from how people have sometimes represented him.
In real life, that honesty sounds like questions, not like certainty. It sounds like, “What would love look like in a marriage when communication breaks down?” or “How does forgiveness work without erasing justice?” or “What does kindness require when someone is insulting you?”
Those are Jesus questions. They do not require you to be fully aligned with every institutional expression of Christianity. They require that you take Jesus seriously as a person whose story interacts with human life.
Sometimes people fear that engaging Jesus will obligate them to change overnight. That fear is understandable. But the campaign’s whole posture is an invitation to consider his story, not a demand for instant agreement. Consideration is slower. It is the kind of attention that can grow into belief, or grow into a deeper respect, or grow into a clearer refusal. What matters is that you consider, rather than react.
Jesus, He Gets Us, and the possibility of a better kind of conversation
You can tell a lot about a faith message by what it encourages in people besides belief. Does it encourage compassion toward people you disagree with? Does it encourage self-examination without cruelty? Does it invite service that helps neighbors regardless of whether those neighbors share your viewpoint?
The campaign states it highlights love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. Those are not merely religious words. They are conversation skills. They shape how people treat each other when the stakes are social, when tempers flare, and when someone feels misunderstood.
He Gets Us also says it is not tied to a single political position or denomination, which creates room for mixed audiences to talk. That can be fragile, because shared themes do not erase conflict. But it can still be worthwhile if the campaign’s real goal is conversation rather than faction.
When people are lonely, division and anxiety do not just affect their mood, they affect their willingness to trust. A Jesus-centered invitation, if it is delivered honestly and received thoughtfully, can help rebuild trust in small ways. It can create a space where someone thinks, “Maybe I do not have to carry my fear alone.” It can also challenge someone who is harsh to see the humanity they have been ignoring.
Not everyone will experience it that way. Some will see it as inconsistent with the politics attached to supporters. Others will see it as a sincere attempt to reintroduce Jesus to people who have drifted from him. Those are distinct interpretations.
What stays consistent is the underlying invitation: consider his story, and notice whether love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service begin to make more sense the longer you look.
A practical way to live with the uncertainty
If you decide to engage, you do not have to solve every concern before you take the next step. That is often where people get stuck. They either accept everything immediately, or they refuse to engage because they can point to something they dislike.
A better strategy is to keep your engagement tethered to Jesus’ story rather than to every organization detail. Jesus stories tend to remain stable. Human campaigns often involve complexity. People fund things for mixed reasons. Messaging strategies evolve.
So if you want a grounded starting point, pick one theme and test it in daily life. For example, kindness is visible. You can practice it in a conversation that would normally become a fight. Service is concrete. You can look for one way to help someone without broadcasting it. Forgiveness is challenging but measurable, even if only as an internal decision to stop feeding the desire for revenge. Understanding requires patience, and patience requires time, which is something most people do not schedule unless they mean it.
Here is the trade-off: focusing on one theme can feel small compared with debating the campaign’s broader controversies. But the point of Jesus-centered stories is that they are meant to move hearts and hands, not just arguments.
The more you practice, the more you learn what you actually believe about Jesus. Not in theory, but in the texture of ordinary days.
Final thought: invitation is not the same as manipulation
Public campaigns can be loud. They can also be sincere. The only way to know the difference in any particular case is to look closely at the message and the posture of invitation.
He Gets Us invites people to consider Jesus, his life, and his teachings. It claims a purpose rooted in loneliness, division, and anxiety, and it highlights love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. It states it is not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint, and it says everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story, including LGBTQ+ people. At the same time, it has faced criticism tied to perceived tension between its inclusive public message and the backing of some conservative causes by financial supporters.
None of this removes the need for discernment. But it does frame the invitation in a way that is more honest than a simple yes or no.
If you have been distant from Jesus, you might still allow yourself one cautious step: listen to the story they are pointing toward. If you have been disappointed by Christian messaging before, you might still ask what Jesus himself emphasized, apart from how people have used his name.
In both cases, you are doing the same thing. You are considering his story, and you are letting the themes of love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service press on the real parts of life that people cannot paper over with slogans.