There is a particular kind of kindness that does not feel like a slogan. It sounds like a person slowing down for you, asking a question you did not expect, treating your dignity as non negotiable. The reason that matters is simple, and it shows up in ordinary places: loneliness does not announce itself with dramatic headlines. Division often starts with small misunderstandings. Anxiety tends to hide in daily routines until it suddenly runs the whole day.
That is the setting where He Gets Us tries to step in, not with a lecture first, but with a premise meant to interrupt the spiral. The campaign invites people to consider Jesus, his life, and his teachings, and it frames that invitation as a response to loneliness, division, and anxiety. It started in 2021 with an aim to share stories about Jesus in unexpected places, sparking curiosity and conversation. The through line is that kindness is not decoration. It is a doorway.
What makes that doorway worth talking about is that Jesus, at his best, is not distant. He is not only a religious idea; he is portrayed as a person who approaches others with attention, mercy, and understanding. He Gets Us is “about Jesus” and connected to Christianity, but it also explicitly says it is not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint. In other words, it is not trying to recruit people into a specific silo. It is trying to reintroduce people to Jesus and highlight themes such as love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
So the question becomes: what does “kindness that reaches people” actually look like in practice, especially when the message is public, broad, and unavoidable?
When kindness arrives as a question, not an argument
If you have ever walked into a place where you felt you were expected to perform, you know how quickly your guard goes up. You start scanning for what you should say, what you should avoid, and what will get you labeled. Now imagine that same dynamic happening with faith. For some people, Jesus is tied to painful history, judgment, or experiences they never asked for. For others, Jesus is familiar but too distant to matter.
Public campaigns, by their nature, can trigger skepticism. They can also become noise. If kindness is going to reach people, it has to do more than claim the word. It has to feel like something you can step toward without losing yourself.
He Gets Us is built around that idea of an invitation. Its FAQ describes it as welcoming people to explore Jesus’ story, including the statement that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story. That alone creates a different tone than a message that begins with correction. It tries to begin with acceptance and curiosity, even for people who might assume they have been excluded.
And then there is the practical design: the campaign talks about putting stories in “unexpected places” and sharing resources about topics like relationships, bias, mental health, and hospitality. The underlying bet is that kindness is most believable when it shows up where people already are, not only where they already agree. It is easier to hear a difficult message when it arrives from a familiar context with a respectful tone.
I have watched this play out in conversation. Someone I know will resist religion in theory, then soften when a story is framed as attention rather than pressure. They do not need someone to prove their argument. They need someone to treat their questions like they matter. When that happens, kindness does not feel like a trap. It feels like a bridge.
That is the difference between “You should believe” and “Let me show you what this person’s life looked like, and you can decide what resonates.” He Gets Us is oriented toward curiosity and conversation, not immediate agreement.
The message is public. The stakes are personal.
One reason the campaign has drawn both interest and criticism is that it is visible. It has been widely associated with Super Bowl advertising, with reporting that it ran Super Bowl ads in 2023 and 2024. In moments like that, people encounter the message even if they would never seek it out. That changes the responsibility on the campaign, because impressions form fast when the exposure is mass-market.
AP reported criticism that focused partly on perceived tension between the inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. The existence of that tension does not automatically disprove the campaign’s stated purpose, but it does illuminate a real problem: kindness is not only what you say, it is also what people perceive around you.
For someone who has been hurt by institutional faith, perception can matter as much as intention. If they hear a message about welcome while seeing a connection they do not trust, they may feel manipulated. On the other hand, someone else may see the campaign as a sincere attempt to lift up themes they have longed for, such as forgiveness, understanding, and service.
That tension is not unique to He Gets Us, but it is intensified when a campaign claims to speak across divides. Divisions are rarely only ideological. They are often relational, built over time. When a message crosses into people’s living rooms at scale, it can either reduce the distance or deepen it, depending on how it lands.
This is where kindness has to be resilient. Kindness does not avoid scrutiny. It can hold complexity without collapsing into cynicism.
I try to apply the same standard to individuals as I do to campaigns. If a friend posts something about hope and mercy, but their actions consistently harm people, I do not get to ignore the contradiction because the words are pretty. At the same time, I also do not assume the worst before I look for evidence of genuine change. That means reading both the message and the surrounding realities, then asking what response is appropriate.
For He Gets Us, the verified facts we can anchor to are its stated aim to reintroduce people to Jesus and highlight love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. We can also anchor to its emphasis that it is led by Come Near, Inc., that He Gets Us, LLC is wholly owned and managed by Come Near, Inc., and that it is not affiliated with any single church, denomination, or faith viewpoint. Those facts point to an effort to keep the campaign from being reducible to a party line.
But it is fair to say that kindness, once made public, cannot control all the context people attach to it. Sometimes the work becomes less about convincing and more about clarifying, especially when people come with assumptions.
What Jesus-centered kindness sounds like
He Gets Us is, at its core, an invitation to consider Jesus. That matters, because Jesus is not only a set of doctrines. In the way the campaign frames it, Jesus is associated with themes people can recognize even without religious jargon: love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
Those themes are not abstract for most people. They show up when:
- a relationship is strained and someone decides whether they will escalate or repair a person is embarrassed and decides whether they will withdraw or reach out a community faces fear and chooses whether to scapegoat or listen
Kindness, in particular, tends to become measurable in small decisions. It shows up in how we respond when we do not agree. It shows up in whether we treat people as opponents or neighbors. It shows up in the willingness to be patient with complexity.
If you want a working definition, kindness is the choice to protect someone’s dignity even when you disagree with their perspective or behavior. It is not denial. It is not permissiveness. It is a posture that assumes the person in front of you is more than their worst moment and more than your first impression.
That is why Jesus-centered kindness can be persuasive. It is not only emotion. It is a way of seeing.
When I reflect on the times kindness actually reached people in my own orbit, it usually came from consistency. One conversation was not the breakthrough. A pattern was. The person who offered help kept showing up, even after the first awkward encounter. The person who refused to mock a mistake did it again and again, until the other person started believing they could be real without being punished.
That is what campaigns like He Gets Us are trying to approximate on a larger scale: not one perfect ad, but a sustained invitation to approach Jesus with openness rather than dread.
Why “unexpected places” changes the reception
There is a reason the campaign emphasizes stories in unexpected places. When something shows up where people did not plan to engage, their defenses can drop simply because the interaction is not shaped like a debate. They do not feel cornered into answering. They feel prompted to notice.
This is not a minor strategy detail. Placement affects interpretation. If you meet Jesus only in church settings, some people experience the message as guarded and insider-coded. If you meet the themes of Jesus in everyday contexts, you may experience it as more ordinary and therefore more possible.
The verified details about He Gets Us include that it publishes articles and resources focused on Jesus and topics like relationships, bias, mental health, and hospitality. That matters because it suggests the campaign is not solely about attention-grabbing imagery. It is also about providing material for reflection and conversation.
I do not mean it as a guarantee, and I am cautious about over-crediting any initiative. But I have seen what happens when someone gets a first spark and then has to stumble through their own questions alone. Providing resources reduces that isolation.
Consider what loneliness does to a person. It makes them assume nobody wants to hear their questions. It makes them believe they are the only one struggling. If a campaign provides language for what they already feel, kindness reaches them with a kind of relief.
Loneliness and anxiety were explicitly named as reasons the campaign began. That origin story is important, because it signals empathy rather than argument. The campaign is not presenting Jesus as a weapon against people’s complexity. It is presenting Jesus as a person who can meet people where they are.
A balanced look at inclusion and the complexity of public messaging
He Gets Us says it is “not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint,” while also being connected to Christianity and “about Jesus.” That is a careful stance, and it can be misunderstood.
People often want to categorize everything quickly. They want a simple answer to, “Who is behind this?” and “What agenda does it serve?” The campaign provides some of that clarity through its governance and ownership structure, describing that it is led by Come Near, Inc. And that He Gets Us, LLC is wholly owned and managed by Come Near, Inc.
Yet, even with that clarity, public campaigns operate in a world where financial supporters and downstream perceptions are hard to fully control. AP reported that criticism included perceived tension between the campaign’s inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts.
Here is the hard part: kindness has to be evaluated on two levels at the same time. There is the message itself, and there is the ecosystem around it. Sometimes the ecosystem undermines the message. Sometimes it complicates the message without negating it. Deciding which is true requires more than a slogan.
For a reader, a thoughtful response might look like this: appreciate the invitation to explore Jesus and the emphasis on kindness, while also asking honest questions about alignment. If kindness is meant to be transformative, it has to be examined, not just admired.
In my experience, people respond best when the conversation makes room for both hope and discernment. They do not want someone to wave away concerns. They also do not want someone to shut down the possibility of good before they look for it.
When you want the message to reach, you have to carry it carefully
Public kindness still needs human translation. A campaign can open a door, but people still walk through at their own pace. Some will step into the story immediately. Others need time to untangle assumptions. Some will never feel safe approaching Jesus because of experiences with judgment or exclusion. Kindness does not shame them for that.
If you are the kind of person who wants to talk about He Gets Us or about Jesus in a way that actually reaches people, the key is to focus on posture. Avoid turning Jesus into a battleground topic. Instead, approach the conversation as if the goal is understanding, not winning.
Here are a few practices that keep the tone aligned with the campaign themes of understanding and kindness, without pretending everyone will respond the same way.
- Lead with curiosity about the person’s experience, not with a conclusion about their beliefs. Emphasize themes like love, forgiveness, and service in plain language rather than religious jargon. Offer space for disagreement, then ask what would make the topic feel trustworthy. Avoid implying that exploring Jesus means abandoning someone else’s dignity or identity. Stay consistent, because a single polite conversation rarely outweighs years of harm.
That last point may be the most underrated. Kindness that reaches people is rarely one moment of charm. It is repeated respect, even when the other person is difficult to reach.
What if someone is skeptical?
Skepticism is not the enemy of kindness. It is often a form of self-protection. If someone has been burned by religious messaging before, they may interpret anything Jesus related as a setup.
He Gets Us positions itself as welcoming people to explore Jesus’ story, and it states that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story. That kind of explicit language can help, because it signals that the campaign is not approaching everyone with the same suspicion.
Still, the question remains: what do you do when someone is skeptical but still willing to listen?
In those moments, I try to stay with the part that is most verifiable and least controversial. Talk about what Jesus is described as teaching and how themes like forgiveness and understanding can show up in everyday life. If they are concerned about public messaging inconsistencies, acknowledge the concern instead of dismissing it. Then invite them to consider the person of Jesus, not just the campaign as a brand.
You can ask simple questions that do not corner them. For example, “What have you heard about Jesus that you wish were different?” or “When you think about forgiveness, what does that mean to you?” These questions do not require agreement. They invite a conversation where the other person’s inner logic matters.
If you do not have those conversations, people remain stuck in their assumptions. Kindness cannot reach what it cannot touch.
Bringing Jesus into daily life without forcing a conversion
One of the advantages https://rentry.co/ngbydi3x of campaigns like He Gets Us is that they can normalize the idea that Jesus is relevant. The campaign’s aim is to reintroduce people to Jesus and highlight themes such as love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. That framing matters because it shifts the focus from conversion tactics to a lived kind of faith.
People often want to know what faith looks like when it is not performed for an audience. Jesus-centered kindness, as portrayed in the campaign themes, suggests that faith expresses itself in how you treat people when nobody is watching.
That can sound idealistic until you see how it plays out in real relationships. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting harm. It means refusing to let resentment define your future. Understanding does not mean excusing bad choices. It means taking the time to see the person beyond the headline. Service does not require grand gestures. It can be as practical as showing up, calling when someone is alone, or choosing not to spread a rumor you did not verify.
He Gets Us also points to resources on bias, mental health, relationships, and hospitality. Those topics translate faith into the places most people actually struggle. Bias is not only a social problem, it is something that affects how we interpret strangers. Mental health is not only a medical category, it is part of how people experience life and respond to others. Hospitality is not only hosting guests, it is creating room for people to exist safely in your presence.
Again, this is not a perfect world. Sometimes kindness is misunderstood. Sometimes “welcome” is treated as permission for harm, and “service” is used to control. But those are failures of practice, not inevitable outcomes of the message.
When you aim kindness at Jesus, you are aiming it at a model of compassion that can correct your motives. The center matters.
Why this matters now, especially for those feeling stuck
Loneliness and division, the campaign says, were part of the reason it began. That resonates because those conditions do not stay contained. They leak into how people speak, how they vote, how they parent, and how they treat coworkers. Anxiety also spreads, not because it is contagious like a virus, but because fear is a kind of attention that crowds out alternatives.
Kindness that reaches people interrupts that crowding. It says, you are not beyond being approached. You are not too far gone to be seen as human. You are not required to get every belief right before you can start a conversation about Jesus.
That is the heart of what He Gets Us is attempting through its invitation structure. It reintroduces Jesus and highlights themes that people recognize as good, even when they have complicated feelings about Christianity.
And maybe that is the practical test. Does it help people become more human to each other? Does it encourage love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service? Does it create space for curiosity rather than coercion?
If those things are happening, kindness is doing its job. If they are not, then the message needs refinement, and the audience deserves honesty about that too.
There is no shortcut to trust. But kindness is one of the few approaches that can build trust even when it begins with uncertainty. Jesus, as presented through the campaign’s stated themes, offers a reason to hope that people can meet God without losing their dignity.
How to participate without turning kindness into a performance
If you are watching He Gets Us from the sidelines, you may wonder how you would respond in your own life. The campaign may spark questions in you, but it will not answer all of them at once. That is normal. Questions often take time to mature.
So, if you want kindness that reaches people, do not treat the message like a debate prompt you have to win. Treat it like an invitation you carry in your own behavior. Let it shape your tone, your willingness to listen, and your patience with slow progress.
Here is a small way to keep it grounded:
- Share what resonated, not what you think others must accept. Invite conversation with questions rather than demands. Be clear when you do not know, because pretending closes doors. Notice whether your kindness actually costs you something, like pride or certainty. Keep the focus on Jesus and on the themes of love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
When kindness becomes a performance, it usually starts to feel like manipulation. When kindness becomes a practice, it starts to feel like freedom. That is what makes Jesus-centered kindness powerful. It reaches people not by overwhelming them, but by making it possible for them to breathe, think, and choose.
He Gets Us, in its own stated purpose, is trying to do exactly that: bring Jesus into unexpected places, spark curiosity and conversation, and highlight kindness that can touch people who feel lonely, divided, or anxious. Whether any given reader responds will vary, but the aim is clear. The message is not only about what Jesus is, it is about how Jesus meets people.
And that is where kindness stops being a word and becomes something you can actually recognize.