By Benjamin Cremer via Facebook
Have you noticed the varied reactions to the “He Gets Us” campaign?
I just wanted to add a few thoughts for consideration as the conversation continues.
As followers of Jesus, I think it is important to find out why so much money is spent on Super Bowl ads, who is spending that money, and their reasons for doing so. Especially when that money could be used to for so many other humanitarian needs and whether we like it or not, their actions shape our collective reputation as Christians.
As followers of Jesus, I also think it is important not to use commercials about Jesus, which at face value do promote a good and needed message in and of themselves, and our possible skepticism about them to cause more public lashing out against each other in an already divided world. Our culture sees enough of that division within the church as it is already. It would be to disregard the message the commercial was trying to convey. A message we Christians in America need to hear more than anyone else.
With that said, after thinking about this for a long while, I just had some personal thoughts to share about why the reactions might be so varied and tenuous among Christians.
My heart is so weary of how we have commercialized Jesus, so often at the expense of embodying the way of Jesus ourselves.
As a millennial, I came of age in the world of religious tracts, street preachers, people holding signs that read “repent or burn” in heavily trafficked areas, paintings of Jesus with presidents, Christian t-shirts, music, and entire industries that attempted to advertise Jesus in every possible way, with a seemingly willful disregard for how it might impact our public witness as Christians.
I also worked food service throughout my entire academic journey. From 2001 to 2013, I worked at Dairy Queen, Smokey Mountain Pizza Co., Olive Garden, and then Starbucks. Looking back, this experience profoundly changed my perspective of “Christian evangelism.” I was studying to be a pastor then and got a front-row seat to how Christians interacted with food service workers.
There wasn’t a week that went by where I wouldn’t get several Christian tracts thrust in my face as I handed food through the drive-through, before the driver abruptly drove away.
There wasn’t a week that I wouldn’t get a religious tract disguised as a $100 bill left on the table with their check, often with no actual tip left. When I turned the tract over, it would say, “Disappointed? Well, you’ll never be disappointed with Jesus.” I was a student in desperate need of money, and this is how they chose to share “the gospel” with me.
There wasn’t a week that I wouldn’t hear my non-Christian coworkers complain about the “after church” crowd because of how poorly they would be treated and how low the tips would be.
There wasn’t a week that I wouldn’t be mistreated myself, yelled at over something silly like ranch dressing or a soda refill by people who had just prayed over their meal before they ate.
As a pastor in training, I couldn’t help but be really challenged by this and ask why this was happening?
Meanwhile, as I continued to study theology and ministry, I saw churches all over the nation try different methods to try to “attract” the younger generation. Being a millennial, at the time, I was considered the “younger generation.”
We saw the influx of new technology, smoke machines, well-polished music, and worship settings that appealed to modern fashion and style. And of course, the coffee bar. As much as I even enjoyed some of these things, I still felt “advertised” to.
Especially now with the advent of social media, we are advertised to more than ever. Is advertising and marketing really the most important and effective strategy for us Christians to undertake right now?
At the core of this are two elements for me.
First, so many in our culture are so tired of having Jesus advertised to them rather than people who claim to follow him imitating Jesus to them. People both inside and outside the church desperately want people who claim to follow Jesus to actually live out his teachings in the world around us.
Quite frankly, whether it is handing out religious tracts on the street as people pass by or making a million-dollar commercial, it is a really clever way of putting the responsibility to represent Jesus on something else, other than yourself. It is so deeply impersonal. You don’t even know the names of the people you are giving those tracts to or the lived experiences of those who are seeing your commercials, yet you are assuming their relationship with God and telling them “You obviously need this, sinner.” Like leaving it on the table for a pastor in training you don’t even know after you yelled at him about your ranch dressing.
It’s passive, drive-by evangelism. It feels deeply insincere and lazy, especially to the people it is being directed towards.
Secondly, this also plays into how we’ve reduced the gospel of Jesus to what people believe in their heads. I will often hear “If just one person had a change of mind because of that tract or commercial, it was worth it!” Why? Because we’ve made our religion all about getting to heaven and getting to heaven is simply about believing the right things, rather than imitating Jesus with our lives and working to embody God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.” Again, this can easily lead to really callous situations where we don’t even care if our waitstaff has bills to pay or a family to care for. If stiffing them causes them to read about Jesus, even for just a moment, “it will be worth it.”
This kind of evangelism just seems so deeply out of touch with the actual world we live in.
When I think of all this, I hear James, the brother of Jesus, screaming in my ears:
“If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” James 2:16-17
Our world is crying out for faith in action, not faith advertised.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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