For the past several years, the He Gets Us campaign has participated in the Super Bowl with commercials of often questionable quality. When they first debuted their 2023 Super Bowl ad, they were managed by the Servant Foundation, which was managing the fund dedicated to the ad campaign. Their ad campaigns consisted of often low-quality depictions of Jesus that were often identified with “hipster” subcultures. They ran the false “Jesus was a refugee” narrative, and their website was giving heretical answers pertaining to Christ’s perfection. In 2024, they came under the new management of the Come Near Foundation. Same money and brand, but a separate organization. Their ad consisted of pastors washing the feet of various groups. In 2025, they proceeded to use the song Personal Jesus to portray Christians celebrating pride. In both years, they portrayed Christians as the problem with Christianity, which is a consistent theme with He Gets Us.
The leadership has always been liberal, with Ed Stetzer being the theological brain behind the campaign while Ken Calwell managed the foundation. Yet it was not just the staff that were peddling the subversive messaging, but the contractors they hired to produce the advertisements, like LERMA, which consisted of unbelievers marketing a version of Jesus that they themselves would affirm. This, combined with the low-quality ads, which in 2024 consisted of AI generated images, reeked of vapidity and were largely mocked.
2026 Commercial
At $8 million for a thirty-second slot, the He Gets Us campaign is spending roughly $16 million for its one-minute advertisement entitled “More” which asks the question, “Is there more to life than more?”
The ad starts off with the quote, “the one who dies with the most toys wins,” before proceeding into a bunch of arcade and Las Vegas imagery. There is an image of what looks to be an older man getting marked for plastic surgery that seems out of place, as generally it is women who tend to get plastic surgery. There is imagery of more technology, like VR; more money, more strength, and more speed, in which it portrays cars being dropped from planes and performance driving stunts. This ends to a woman in the desert, looking up at the heavens in which the ad says, “There’s more to life than more. What if Jesus shows us how to find it?”
Overall, this is their best Super Bowl ad yet, though the comparisons make this a very low achievement. There is a broad appeal to the consumerist culture of America, and the connotations of Vegas and gambling are increasingly poignant with the prevalence of sports betting.
The description of the ad under the YouTube version states the following:
More things. More progress. More proof that life is working.
This video explores the pressure to keep chasing “more” and what Jesus says about satisfaction, rest, and the life we’re actually looking for.
The voices are familiar. They don’t sound extreme. They sound reasonable. Encouraging, even. They tell us fulfillment is close — just one purchase, one achievement, one breakthrough away. And it works. Until it doesn’t.
The emphasis on the worldly promotion of “more” as sounding benign or reasonable clearly indicates a critique of consumerism that the ad seeks to portray. Perhaps some of the imagery is archaic, which might appear counterintuitive to the campaign in addressing more modern issues. Again, the widespread pervasiveness of DraftKings would make “More Parleys” hit a little closer to home with modern viewers, especially during the Super Bowl. Or a critique of the “Travel Girl” motif by portraying “More Vacations” rather than something more transcendent. Another example might be a critique of modern “Buy Now, Pay Later” services like AfterPay, Klarna, or Affirm that allow people to purchase “More” on credit which they often cannot afford. Too often, the imagery suggests that they are appealing to a caricature of a younger audience rather than actually speaking to them directly. This presents a missed opportunity in an ad that could have said so much more that would be relevant to today’s audience.
He Gets Us Journeys
The He Gets Us campaign’s website has scaled down since it first launched, becoming more aligned with the marketing campaign. In correlation with their Super Bowl commercial, their website focuses on the concept of Journeys, the idea that everyone is seeking more, which they then tie to Christ. There are four Journeys in which the website shows modules that walk visitors through a series of scrolling through their information, which is rather vapid and seeker-sensitive.
The first one is “I Want More” which appeals to the commercial and the natural need humans have for more deriving from uncertainty and insecurity. This then ties to various passages in which Christ discusses providence. The second journey is entitled, “I have Questions” in which it attempts to assuage doubt and invite people to seek discovery, appealing to the story of Galileo dying for his discoveries (a historical misconception) and to John the Baptist having doubts in Luke 7, where Christ appeals to miracles as evidence of greater signs to come. The third journey is entitled, “I can do it all” in which invites the readers to receive rather than strive, appealing to passages where Christ encourages the disciples to “remain in me.” It uses the story of Martha and Mary in Luke 10 to encourage remaining connected rather than preoccupied as Martha was in preparing the dinner. The last is entitled “I want to be me” which begins with stating that people would lose their jobs, friends, and status if they were themselves, that “being real has a cost.” It appeals both to the woman in Luke 8 who healed her hemorrhaging with the touch of Christ’s tassels, and to the Prodigal Son.
Whereas the other text it appeals to are within a reasonable interpretation of their respective passages, this framing is clearly errant. The prodigal son was not some entrepreneurial son who wanted to “make it on his own.” In reality, he was a scoundrel who in demanding his inheritance, wished his father dead. He proceeded to squander the money through loose living, probably consisting of sex and alcohol. His humble return was accepted graciously by the father, but the He Gets Us campaign makes the Prodigal Son appear as a failure rather than wasteful, which is what he truly was in the parable.
The presentation format of the content is designed to slow down the rate at which people receive the information, but the information is largely vapid, which makes the user interface rather unpleasant. A better format would just have devotional paragraphs on a single webpage rather than these more time-intensive modules.
Conclusion
He Gets Us has continued its streak of Super Bowl commercials, which, while many of the problems behind the brand and content persist, have at least exceeded the very low criteria of producing their best commercial yet. Nevertheless, the use of archaic imagery in the commercial presents a missed opportunity to provide a real critique of consumeristic culture that would be more relevant to modern audiences, instead using rather generic images that miss the target audience. For $16 million, they could have done much better and should have a better website infrastructure to provide answers to those who are asking questions.
