Billion Dollar Jesus & the Man in a Chicken House

I wonder if we would have been better off setting all of that money on fire.

A $22 million commercial about Jesus.

I would be lying if I didn’t tell you up front that I found the whole thing grotesque. 

In this economy, when even middle-class families are scraping the barrel to survive, a commercial was on the Super Bowl about Jesus. 

And people were excited about it, too. 

Because in their mind, this billion-dollar campaign represented something that I could not reconcile with my faith. (Yes, I said billion with a B, because this one ad is one piece of a much larger effort).

So, I made a statement. It was a bit of a strawman, I’m not gonna lie. 

The meme (which I did not write) simply said this: 

“If you pay $100 million for Superbowl ads to convert people to Jesus instead of housing the homeless, you read the wrong book.”

I admit, it was a little reductive. But when I saw it, I felt something. At first, maybe it was self-righteousness, but I can assure you, it quickly turned to conviction. 

And now is the moment that I tell you about the time I met a man who lived in a chicken house.

It was 2003, and I had just given my life to Jesus (for the third time) and decided to become a missionary overseas. 

I chose Thailand for reasons that I will go into later, but I believed with all of my heart that God wanted me to be there. And now I think that He truly did… But not for the reasons I originally thought. 

I was there to teach English in a poor rural area called Nakhon Ratchasima. And the reason I chose Thailand is that it fell inside the 1040 Corridor, which in evangelistic terms meant the people of Thailand didn’t know Jesus. My job was to spread the gospel as far and wide as I could to these people who had perhaps in their entire lives never heard His name.

I took this task very seriously as I believed it was my personally responsibility to save people from burning in hell. And so I went, all alone, a 19-year-old girl in a foreign country. 

I did not speak the language. 

I did not understand the culture. 

But it was my job to go there and save them.

Sigh. 

Monday through Friday, I taught English at an elementary school. On Saturdays, we passed out tiny little booklets called tracts, which walked readers through the prayer of salvation in a language that understand. 

There were pictures too, in case they couldn’t read...and just say the material made for one helluva disturbing comic. (Pun intended.)

The tract starts off letting the reader know that they are sinful and hated by God. From there, they are told  thatJesus died for their sins, and if they believed, then God wouldn’t hate them. 

All they had to do was pray a little prayer and no matter what the circumstances were on Earth, when they got to the Afterlife, it would be lovely.

So every Saturday, we drove around a tiny little beat-up pickup truck through dirt roads and hundreds and hundreds of acres of rice fields.

Sometimes we would see 30 people. Sometimes we might meet two. But that’s the thing about the 1040 Corridor. You’re trying to reach the corners of the earth, and these are the furthest corners. 

One day, as our pickup truck was bumping along on a dirt road, I saw a man in the middle of a rice field. He lived in a chicken house. And based on his appearance, he’d been living there for a while. 

“Stop the car,” I said to the other missionaries. 

I knew we had little time to get back home, with the sun going down and not an iPhone between us to guide our way home in the dark. We were working on borrowed time on dirt roads in rural Thailand. But this man, he was the first person we had seen in an hour. Odds were, he didn’t know Jesus. 

It was a long hike between the road and the chicken house, and the rice field was soaked with water. That’s great for the rice. But it’s also great for snakes and other things, too. And I’d already seen a couple of pythons slithering around in the marsh.

So being pragmatists for Jesus, we rolled down the window and yelled Sawadee! 

And then tossed a tract out the damn window.

In that moment, I felt an itch in my spirit. But I passed it off as human weakness. What I was doing was for the higher cause, the furthering of the gospel. Sure, it would be ideal to go and speak with this man. But given my limitations, and the Great Commission, I was satisfied that he had read the name of Jesus. 

Whatever he did with that information was up to him, or at least that’s what I said to myself. 

The ride home felt particularly quiet that evening.

Back to that bajillion dollar Super Bowl commercial, and the meme that I found which criticized it

I hit share on my Fb page, and didn’t think too much of it…until an hour later when I returned to one thousand comments berating me for having the audacity.

People said that it didn’t matter how much money was spent. After all, if one soul was saved, wasn’t that worth $1 billion?

Honestly, I can’t say I believe that. 

A soul might be worth infinite money…but that doesn’t mean we can buy them. Jesus never told us to use our means to spam the world with His brochures. He told us to take care of each other. And the thing is, this billion-dollar campaign was doing NOTHING to help people. 

It was money poorly spent, plain and simple. (Or as scripture calls it, “being a poor steward”)

I have to tell you, after all these years, my beliefs have drastically changed. 

I still love Jesus, and I believe in the Great Commission, but I think it’s been misunderstood. 

All this time we were told to spread the gospel far and wide, and we did with our words and our paper.  And now, apparently, with billion-dollar commercials and advertisements and fancy produced videos. 

But truly, I don’t believe that is what we were asked to do. 

I don’t think we were meant to share the good news. I think we were meant to be it. 

I don’t think we were intended to spread the gospel. I think we were meant to exemplify it. 

I don’t think people need to know about Jesus. I think they need to meet Him through us. 

The church was intended to be His hands and feet, but instead, we decided to become his mouthpiece. His high end Manhattan PR firm, on a mission to set the record (and the gays) all straight. 

If I could go back in time, I would take that tract and light the damn thing on fire. I would use it to keep that man warm. Or I would take the 25 baht out of my pocket that I was intending to buy dinner with and walked across that wet, marshy field. I would give it to that man in the chicken house, who likely needed it to survive. 

I understand why people are excited about that commercial. 10 years ago, I might’ve been excited right along with them. 

But now all I see is a $1,000,000,000 price tag and the amount of good it could’ve done. The lives it could improve while still sharing Jesus. Not just through word of mouth, but by actions. 

Truly putting our money where our mouth is. 

Never mind the billion dollar campaign…the cost of that one Super Bowl commercial could have funded a homeless shelter in the capital of every state I’ve the USA AND paid for operations for an entire year.

But if one soul was saved, right?

No. 

I don’t think that’s good enough. 

I think we were called to do far more than pretend to be Jesus’s PR firm. What many are failing to realize is that we can save souls and save lives at the same time. We don’t have to pick and choose. If we are given the choice between spreading the name of Jesus to save souls and taking care of the poor to save lives, we can choose both. A billion dollars is more than plenty to do both well.

But in this day and age, it’s easier to throw money around than to change our behavior and love folks.

I wonder if we would have been better off setting all of that money on fire. 

At least then, we’d be keeping God’s children warm.