Digital Parish: "He Gets Us": Do we get what it means for digital ministry?

Ryan Dunn:

Hey, this is Pastoring in the Digital Parish, your resource and point of connection for ministry in digital spaces. My name is Ryan Dunn. Real quick, I wanted to let you know where we're at on season five. I spoke at the end of season four, about season five beginning in December, that really was not wise. It's a terrible time to start a new podcast season, at least one that is produced by ministry leaders aimed at an audience of ministry leaders. My bandwidth is low. Your bandwidth is low for podcast consumption right now. So I'm just going to admit that it's in our best interest to officially begin season five in January of 2023. But I did want to get one important conversation in because it deals with the topic in campaign that we're going to see a lot of through December and into January.

It's a big sports and TV season, and I watch sports. Once upon a time during Sportscast, as the camera would pan the crowd, a John 3:16 sign could inevitably be spotted. Remember those days? Normally, it was just like some crude hand drawn sign. Now, it's been a while since I've seen one of those signs. Instead, I've started seeing something loosely related, but just as ever present. You've probably encountered this new thing too. It's not a sign, it's a commercial, and it goes something like this.

He Gets Us:

There was this controversial figure. Everywhere he went, people challenged him, they questioned his ideology, trolled him, called him ugly names. But he never took the bait, never raised his voice, refused to retaliate, because he believed he could change the world by turning the other cheek.

Ryan Dunn:

That He Gets Us campaign surprised me because just like that John 3:16 sign, it's not an advertisement for any specific organization, group or publication, it's an advertisement for Jesus. As a professional involved in church marketing, I found this messaging to be really, really refreshing and somewhat frustrating because I wanted to know the who behind this whole thing. At a digital ministry conference this past year, I got to see behind the curtain a bit. I heard from one of the designers of this campaign, and it turns out this advertising campaign is highly data and research driven. I think that there's a lot for us to learn from this data in regards to the very people who we are trying to build relationships with online as well as how we can come together in shared messaging and practice to connect with spiritual seekers.

So I reached out to Brad Hill, who was the presenter of that data at that conference, and he's going to be our adjunct professor on this J-term kind of session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish. Brad is going to tell us all about the He Gets Us campaign from its inception to its response to how we can get involved. Brad Hill helped develop the He Gets Us campaign and is on the executive team at Gloo that's G-L-O-O, or you can look them up gloo.us, which is an organization that builds digital outreach campaigns, apps, and more. At Gloo, Brad's responsible for marketing, sales, success in all facets of growing and serving Gloo's network of churches, networks, and faith partners. So let's get into it. It's interesting and enlightening stuff. So here's Brad Hill.

Well, Brad, first of all, thanks so much for joining us. Hope you're having a good day today.

Brad Hill:

Doing great, Ryan. Thanks for having me on.

Ryan Dunn:

You bet. I work quite a bit in church marketing. And from my perspective, a lot of church marketing is very church centric, kind of communicating this message of, Hey, look how great our community is. We would love for you to be a part of it. The He Gets Us campaign is not driven like that. I don't see where we're really being asked to join anything besides just this greater movement. And that makes it a question for me, who really is behind the He Gets Us campaign. Can you pull the curtain back on that for us a little bit?

Brad Hill:

Happy to. Sure. And I love that you started with the words church and marketing, because you're right, there's been a long kind of juxtaposition of those things and some people see it very favorably, but not always. And honestly, in my book, marketing really just refers to any sort of, it could be storytelling, but it's really just an idea exchange where I want somebody to understand or maybe think, feel, or do something. But The He Gets Us project, you're right, is so fascinating because there's essentially a group of pretty diverse Christians, actually, that originated this idea, which really began with this question. And it was, how did the world's greatest love story, aka the gospel, the Bible, Jesus specifically, how did that world's greatest love story really get flipped and become so misunderstood? Or in some corners, you may be aware of this, it's even in some cases listed as a hate group to be very, very blunt.

And so how did that happen and how did we get here? And then how might we move forward from here? And that really was the originating thought that sparked some research, which we can get into, and then later this campaign. But now sitting here, present day He Gets Us is its own organization, but it's really a hub of partnerships and that does include ad agencies and it does include technology, it has donors. But also I think for maybe your audience, we're hoping that this tent is big enough to include every church, every ministry that wants to be involved. So one day when we say who's behind He Gets Us, it's like, we all are, everybody.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay. Yeah. Like the church as in church universal kind of deal.

Brad Hill:

That's right.

Ryan Dunn:

You brought up our wariness about church marketing, and I've heard it described that marketing in itself can just be the means through which we open up a relationship. And what's so fascinating to me about the He Gets Us campaign is that it is so much relationship driven in terms of aligning people together. Like, hey, we understand this. Jesus understands this of what we're going through. But that relationship, I think in terms of, well, the marketing of He Gets Us campaign, from the marketing standpoint, you try to identify what are the key performance indicators, what are the goals of it? Have y'all listed out some key performance goals? Are there metrics like that driving the campaign?

Brad Hill:

The He Gets Us campaign at its most basic level, has two big goals, two objectives. First one, the way we would say it is, He Gets Us really seeks to raise the respect and relevance of Jesus. That's a statement more about attitudes and perceptions. It's like, hey, we want to really connect people with the true Jesus of the Bible. We want them to maybe rediscover that, man, this guy had a lot of things to say and teach that are relevant to me that really reflect this kind of brand of radical love that is refreshing and is welcome and is something that I can relate to. So that's really that first objective. Then the second one speaks, I would say, more to those of us that may call ourselves Jesus followers, and that simply is, how might He Gets Us seek to call up or inspire those of us that are Jesus followers to accurately reflect that radical love to the people that we influence.

In other words, is the same Jesus that I hear about in the campaign messages and maybe read about in the Bible, is that the same Jesus that we are reflecting? And obviously I'm first in line, but we're all imperfect vessels, so we all have growth there. And those two simple objectives, raise the respect and relevance, next, inspire us to reflect, we think that those two together really give us a pretty compelling chance to re-invite or re-get the attention, if you will, of folks that have maybe tuned out and maybe who are not just coming into our churches. And a lot of that is based on actually some of the statements and findings we got during the research. So that informs those tactics.

Ryan Dunn:

Let's talk about that research because I found it so compelling when I caught part of a presentation that you gave at a Digital Ministry conference and revealing the research that helped to build the messaging of the He Gets Us Campaign. Maybe let's start with the base level of research. What was the methodology? Were you sending out questionnaires to people at large to figure out what they were looking for or where'd you begin?

Brad Hill:

First of all, full disclosure, Ryan, I love stats, I love research. I'm a research nerd. A lot of marketers probably can relate. But I always think it's better to go into something maybe defining the objective and also, as you're alluding to, how are we going to know if we win? How are we going to know if we made a difference? So the research that really stands first and foremost behind He Gets Us was about six plus months, almost all conducted during 2021. And it was a combination of qualitative, quantitative across all told over 8,000 different American adults were surveyed in certain ways, some general pop surveys, some were close-in group discussions, but there were three basic questions that was really around that attitudes, perceptions. And the three categories kind of inspected were, what are the attitudes and perceptions about the church? What are the attitudes, perceptions about Jesus? And then finally, what about Christians?

And we've got, by the way, lots of detail for all the other research nerds out there to go check out, happy to share that link. But the headline, the spoiler on it would be probably less surprising to a lot of us. And that is, Hey, the church, by and large, if we ask folks who are not regular practicing Christians, not church people, the church is maybe at best sort of irrelevant and it could go down downhill from there. A lot of folks would voice maybe some sense of hurt or some sense of negative emotion about our churches. And honestly, the news for Christians wasn't a whole lot better. We heard phrases a lot like, "Hey, I've had some bad interactions with Christians", or "I've seen them say one thing yet do another" kind of that hypocrisy that we unfortunately sometimes earn a label for.

And so those were a little bit kind of headwinds, if you will. But when the questions turn to Jesus, this is the great news, is that the perception of Jesus, even for those who don't claim to follow him, mostly tends to be neutral, leaning positive. In fact, a lot of those phrases you would hear things such as, "Yeah, I think Jesus is a good guy." Or "I think his teachings were probably net good." Or even a few folks would say, "If the world just lived the way Jesus taught, we'd all be better off." And so we chose to really lean in on that particular finding and particularly the idea that, for heaven's sake, in this day and age, we're all carrying things. We all have a journey, we all have a story. Lot of felt needs exist in almost everyone's experience. And a lot of the folks in the research were, honestly, this was so kind of surprising, but cool, they were surprised that Jesus had anything relevant to say about the stuff that they were carrying in their lives.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay.

Brad Hill:

So you would hear someone say like, "Huh, I had no idea that Jesus talked about relationships", or, "It never dawned on me, I've never heard that Jesus cared about money or finances or mental health." And so after that sunk in, it's like the audience actually told us our strategy for this campaign. They said, Hey, now that I hear that, if you can connect my felt needs, the stuff that I'm really going through, with Jesus, you have my attention. So if you can essentially show me that Jesus gets me and that he understands what I'm going through, man, I'm listening to that. So that obviously then played right into this concept of He Gets Us. I have a shared experience with Jesus that I never realized, and so that's really the hook.

Ryan Dunn:

It's ironic because it's so simplistic, right? The role of the church is to build the community of Christ, this community that is built around Jesus. And yet so often when we think about growing the church, we think about growing the community instead of putting people in touch with Christ. So were you kind of surprised by just how excited people got about Jesus, especially after hearing maybe some of the [inaudible 00:14:59] that they expressed about the church?

Brad Hill:

Well, honestly, I got excited. I think a lot of us, you're right, it's so simple. It's like probably a kindergartner could come up with this. And yet as you're alluding to, it honestly doesn't reflect a lot of times the way that we might think about going out and messaging as churches, as Christians, et cetera. So in a very simplistic way to stay with the simple thread, the more we make it about, you used the word earlier, relationship. So if we make it about the individual's relationship with Jesus and the fact that there is common ground there, there is shared experience there, man, that's a really compelling place to begin as opposed to maybe the way we traditionally think about it is making it about maybe our church or making it about the good things that our church is doing, which are all wonderful.

But quite honestly, we heard in some corners people would say, I sort of expect the churches do good things, that doesn't really impress me all that much. Please keep going with feeding the poor. Please keep going with serving the community. We sort of expect that, but that's different for me than if you're trying to connect it to me personally.

Ryan Dunn:

Following that line of thinking, what surprised you the most about the research phase?

Brad Hill:

Well, I think the really encouraging aspect for us was we took a look at where people fall in America on a spectrum between being maybe very far from God and very closed off. We may think classically of someone who considers themselves to be an atheist or has made a conscious decision to say, no, I don't want any part. That would be, let's say, one end of a spectrum all the way to the other end, someone who is self-avowed, Jesus follower, practicing Christian, Christian worldview. So what was really surprising and encouraging, I think, was there's a gigantic group of people in the middle who really fit this description of, hey, they're not just walking into our churches. They may or may not consider themselves to be a "Jesus follower", whatever that means. But they're open, they're spiritually open. It doesn't mean they don't have questions. They may actually have questions or be skeptical of faith, but they're open.

And our research, basically this category of people, the spiritually open, the skeptical, we are looking at about 54% of the US adults in that category. So when the campaign goes out with messages, that's the person that we have in mind, is that group. And because they have questions, because they have skepticism, the whole kind of onus on the campaign is to invite them in with these messages that might get their attention, that might tell a story in a way that they're not used to. But we really want that person to retain a sense of agency that they can explore, they can read, they can watch, they can listen at their own pace, on their own terms.

And if and when they decide they want to go further, take action, get connected, that opportunity's there for them. So we're playing the long game here with that group of people that the research revealed. And right now, our best guess is that He Gets Us is a sustained conversation, we think, two to three years or longer. So we have some time, we think, to develop this conversation with that group and hopefully move them along at the pace they feel comfortable going.

Ryan Dunn:

So to move through the "marketing funnel", a user sees one of the ads, maybe they're watching a football game, they're moved to check out the website. And the website, there's nothing heavy handed on it. It's not like you're instantly there and you're instantly being faced with the eternal questions or anything like that. It's logical in inviting to a next step. And it looks like maybe those next steps are to explore a little bit more. There are some reading plans available. There's also an opportunity then to connect with somebody at a local level. Can you share a little bit about how that is going to organized and facilitated?

Brad Hill:

Yeah, and it's important, I think, Ryan, too, to sort of peek behind the curtain a little bit, which sounds mysterious, but hopefully is not. We think a lot about this simple concept we call The Two Bridges. When we're speaking to someone with these messages, really what He Gets Us is aiming to do is that respect and relevance I mentioned earlier, we focus primarily on the humanity of Jesus. We want them to hopefully build or strengthen a respect for who he was, what he said, how he lived, how he taught. You'll notice in that He Gets Us messages that there's no mention really of the divinity of Jesus Nor the gospel. And we do get questions about that. And it's helpful, I think, just to understand that what we've learned is we need to first get a person comfortable with that first bridge because we cannot open up with an assumption that they believe in God or certainly that they believe Jesus is God, the Trinity.

All of these theological concepts do come, but first we believe we've got our best chance to really just introduce the respect of Jesus. And so as you're saying, then when they get comfortable, and we hope more curious as they go through reading or watching things, then we're seeing many, many folks who get to a point, they're like, "Hey, I want to read more. I've got questions. I want to connect with someone." So the campaign has built mechanisms, part of that is through the organization I represent, which is Gloo. And that affords the person an opportunity to say, "Hey, could you connect me to someone local?" Maybe it's an individual, maybe it's a group, and then we get to work. Again, they've taken the first step raising their hand, if you will. We then connect them with any number of churches, ministries, other people that are explicitly waiting to respond, saying, "Yes, send me that person. I'd love to engage with them in relationship."

And that's where that second bridge then shows up because we know there's so many amazing churches, ministries and other partners that do seek to fulfill the great commission, that do seek to share the great news of Jesus fully. Our hope is just that He Gets Us has brought that person a little bit forward to a place where they're maybe interested or ready to hear the rest of the story.

Ryan Dunn:

Have you been hearing from some of the users, are they sharing their experiences? Are they offering some responses to what they've encountered through He Gets Us campaign?

Brad Hill:

The stories have been really just breathtaking, certainly at a macro level, but individually even more. We've had a number of folks posting on social media to writing in via email. I'm fortunate, occasionally, to get to read some of these. So it's really heartening to see a lot of stories from people. I'll start with an example where somebody might say, "I used to be involved in church", or "I grew up in church", or what have you. And then various versions of they'll share something that happened or maybe some disconnect occurred that sent them away, that was hurtful or they'd maybe just drifted and then something in this campaign caught them. A phrase we hear a lot is, "I've never thought of it that way", or "No one's ever shown me this side of Jesus before". Which is really encouraging because that's those messages and those ads kind of doing their job.

And then we've had just incredible, you have to just sit back in your chair kind of stories where one of the things we make available is various items that people, physical items like shirts, hats, water bottles that individuals can obtain and they don't pay for these things with money, that's one of the interesting little twists in the campaign is if you go to check out in your shopping cart with a hat or a shirt, when you get to the payment method instead of Visa, MasterCard in a little menu, it says, "Do you want to pay for this by forgiving someone or welcoming a stranger or loving an enemy?" Which radical act of love do you want to practice just like Jesus did?

And so we've had folks post as a result of that, for example, maybe a picture of a water bottle that shows up on someone's Twitter feed and it says, "Hey, I paid for this with forgiveness." And then going on to declare as an example, "I forgive this person that greatly hurt me 30 years ago", or other variants of that. And so we've been at college football games where folks at a tailgate environment just breakdown in tears talking about, "Wow, I wasn't expecting to encounter Jesus today showing up at a football game, and yet here we are. I needed this at this moment." So we're witnessing just all the incredible ways that Jesus' love really cuts through a lot of things in this day and age.

And then on a macro level, the opportunity for churches is tremendous. I mean, lots of pastors are sharing with us, "This is some of the best ministry I've ever done." That's a common quote. The people coming through here, they're dropping pretense, they're honest, they're open. I know exactly what I'm walking into if I'm texting back with one of these explorers or people that come through. It's early still, we're only six or seven months in, but we see a lot of great response as a result of what's happening.

Ryan Dunn:

Talk to me about that process a little bit. You mentioned that pastors are texting with people who have, I guess, expressed interest in being contacted by people through the campaign. Is there a set way of responding to folks who fill out an online form saying, yeah, I'd like to speak with somebody locally?

Brad Hill:

Sure, yeah. So I mentioned earlier, He Gets Us and Gloo is one of the organizations that serves into this. And Gloo has a really simple website platform, if you will, that any church can use and it connects you certainly to He Gets Us. And there's also a variety of other digital and terrestrial campaigns that are finding people. And so as a church, and we're also excited that donors have seen what's happening. And so donors have made all of this available at no cost to churches for 12 months, sometimes longer. And so it's a great opportunity to basically say, yep, I'm a church in whatever city and I would love to reach people I'm not reaching. That's the start.

So then we have a website connected with He Gets Us, it's actually hegetsuspartners.com and we can give that link later, but that's where a church would sign up. And depending on where you are, there's a volume of people that are coming through these ads. And the experience you would have is you literally have an inbox, and we call these people, explorers, just kind of coining the term. Everyone's exploring something.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay.

Brad Hill:

So you literally get a new alert that you have a new explorer in your inbox, and we have lots of great coaching and training for pastors. What we're not trying to do is teach you how to do ministry, because we believe our churches, that's where they excel. We're not trying to teach you how to have relationships. But we have learned a lot of things about just simple ways to respond. How do you have that first reach out in ways that get the conversation going? So we encourage our churches to build a team around this so it's not just maybe on the pastor's shoulders. A lot of our best performing churches here have volunteers doing this, especially if those volunteers have a heart to just walk alongside someone, maybe send some texts, maybe eventually grab coffee or a Zoom call. And eventually, some of these folks may decide they want to come visit your church. But we also really just emphasize first the idea of relationship, we're trying to get people to discover Jesus one step at a time.

Ryan Dunn:

You mentioned some of the testimonial responses that leaders have been offering. Is there more to build on there? Have you heard a good amount of feedback from within the church to the campaign?

Brad Hill:

Yeah, and one of the things, Ryan, that I spend a lot of time when I'm with groups of pastors, there's something I call the water cooler moment that is a kind of phenomenon that's happening because of He Gets Us. These ads are showing up everywhere. I get text all the time. I just saw one of the commercials on the World Series, or I was watching The Office last night and I saw one of the ads. I was helping my in-laws buy a new cell phone two weeks ago, and we're standing in the Verizon store and all their TVs suddenly have a Jesus ad coming on. So the water cooler moment just refers to this idea that, hey, whether you're a church of 90 people or 10,000 people, as your folks go out in their daily life Monday to Saturday, they're going to be in environments where someone turns to you and says, "Hey Ryan, we're friends. You're kind of a religious guy. I saw this Jesus commercial on the game last night. What do you think about that?"

I've had Uber drivers see me wearing a hat and like, "Do you believe that stuff?" And so that's a conversation starter. I didn't have to knock on a door, I didn't have to make it weird. They're coming to us. But the question for a pastor, I think, is knowing that all of your parishioners and congregants may be receiving those sort of questions from neighbors, coworkers, friends, how do you want to get them ready for that? And so that's the other facet of what we've been trying to build with churches is just a growing huge library of teaching, training, discussion guides, even just little prompts. How do you answer a question when someone saw the ad that says Jesus was wrongly judged? What's a good way to start a conversation around that? So every church has full access to what we call, He Gets Us hub, and it's really designed to help you be the guide, if you will, if you're a church leader, and get your people ready for these conversations, because they are coming.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay. And is that hub, is that available then at the hegetsuspartners.com?

Brad Hill:

That's right. Yeah. As a church leader, if you go to that site, you'll see a signup button, it's yellow. And when you create a quick account for your church, again, it's free, that gets you into the hub where all those resources are. Once you're in the hub, you'll see another button that says Connect to Explorers. And so that's an extra just special step if you're one of those churches that says, yep, in addition to the content and teaching guides and conversation prompts, in addition to all that, I'm a church that would like to receive people. We call those explorers. So that other step. We don't assume out of the gate that every church is ready or wants to receive people. So we want to make sure you you're ready for that, but it's an open invitation.

And Ryan, before we went on, I was just sharing with you, we need more churches based on the volume that we're seeing in all respects. So we need more churches getting their people ready. One announcement I can share is that as big as the campaign has been, it's only growing and come early next year, we'll be on the Super Bowl among-

Ryan Dunn:

Right on.

Brad Hill:

Many other opportunities. So the whole country will be seeing these messages and we'd love it if the church is ready to engage as a result of that.

Ryan Dunn:

I think that this offers a really cool model for us to explore around a little bit in ourselves as leaders in terms of building community in digital space and what that looks like. So certainly, we're using digital means to open a relationship with people through He Gets Us campaign, and then it's fascinating to explore the conversational level of that and how that comes about so that you're able to not just throw a message at somebody but now connect to people together through digital means. And so for churches, especially, that are looking to, I guess, dip their toes in to start exploring that, this is a great opportunity to do that kind of connectional ministry. It's great.

Brad Hill:

We think so. Yeah. And just to throw in, since you're focusing on digital, which I love, one of the places this plays out is online. So as we think about conversations, they don't just happen face to face. A lot of this today happens in comments and news feeds and everywhere else. And quite honestly, as Jesus followers, the way that we present ourselves there is as much or more a representation of Jesus' love. And so one of the things the campaign's already saying, and we're going to really amplify in the new year, is really a call and a challenge for all of us to think about the way that we interact online and think about the way that, hey, before you post that comment, think about, hey, in this moment, if you're representing that love of Jesus well, and maybe just, it would be great if we could all be known for presenting a different way of interacting online.

And in fact, some of the messaging that we'll be launching in and around the Super Bowl, we'll get into this topic a little bit more. So for all of your audience that spend any time on social media, myself included, it's a great call to think about that in the new year.

Ryan Dunn:

One final question for you, it actually kind of jumps out of the He Gets Us campaign, but only a little bit. Tell us a little bit about Gloo.

Brad Hill:

Sure. Gloo is, we spend a lot of time thinking about how the church, the Big C Church can get connected. And so as we've just talked about, that could mean connecting people from ads into our churches, but it can also mean connecting churches to resources that they need. It could mean connecting people within our four walls of our church better together through communications, engagement, et cetera. So we serve tens of thousands of churches across the country. We have deep relationships with many of the networks and denominations who serve them. And so a lot of our churches who use Gloo would say that Gloo helps me reach people I'm not reaching. It helps me better communicate and engage with the folks that I'm serving. It also provides me ways to know how my people are doing. So there's a lot of great tools in Gloo assessments and other content tools that are really designed to help leaders confidently take the right next step with the people you're trying to serve.

Gloo has a lot of great tools. He Gets Us as a wonderful place to start with Gloo, and then there's a lot of other things that you can do with Gloo to help hopefully kind of boldly step forward into the future of ministry. I love that you're spending time on digital, because we do too. But we also know a lot of leaders are thinking about, man, how do I get the best of digital, the best of analog, really focus on the relationship. So that's what you'll find on Gloo.

Ryan Dunn:

Well, Brad, thank you so much for spending this time with us and for pulling back the curtain a little bit on this cool advertising campaign.

Brad Hill:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Ryan Dunn:

A couple websites worth checking out. hegetsuspartners.com has some useful resources and information on how you and your ministry can get involved in the campaign too. Brad's organization is Gloo, again, G-L-O-O, they're at gloo.us.

If this podcast is meaningful for you, the best thing that you can do is listen to another episode. And while listening, go ahead and mesh a positive rating or drop a review. My name again is Ryan Dunn. I'd like to thank resourceumc.org, the online destination for leaders throughout the United Methodist Church. They make this podcast possible, and of course, they host our website, pastoringinthedigitalparish.com, where you can find more online resources for ministry as well as those relevant links. If you want to connect, check out our Pastoring in the Digital Parish group on Facebook. You can also send me questions and ideas for future sessions at digitalparish@umcom.org. I'll be in touch soon about season five, January, 2023. In the meantime, peace.