Lots of churches want to know what resources are out there to share the life-changing good news of Jesus. We’ve interviewed people who created or are using each tool.
The 321 Course by Speak Life is an online program that invites participants to explore life from Jesus’ perspective. Through immersive videos and thoughtful illustrations, the course encourages reflection on fundamental questions about God, the world, and oneself. It comprises eight interactive sessions, each approximately 20 minutes long, designed for flexible engagement. The course is suitable for individual study, one-on-one discussions, or group settings, making it a versatile resource for churches, small groups, and youth organisations. Participants can access the course for free and progress at their own pace, with the option to create an account to track their journey and access additional content.
Glen Scrivener is the director and evangelist at Speak Life, an organisation that exists to revive Christians, resource the church, and reach the world with the good news of Jesus.
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TRANSCRIPT:
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
0:00
People really want to get a sense of who we are.We always say we’ll just go and do 321.And I think when people see this evangelistic course, I think they’ll see the best of what Speak Life do, because it’s a resource for the church.It’s a resource that’s evangelistic, it’s media savvy, it looks great.
0:19
And that it it, it presents a theologically rich and profound vision for who Jesus is, that it might evangelize Christians and it might evangelize the friends of Christians.And out it goes in that ripple effect.So to get a real handle on Speak Life, I think people can go to three two on course.com and just check out 321 because I think that’s really the heartbeat of the ministry.
0:42
That was Glenn Shrivna from Speak Life Media in England.He’s made a number of great evangelistic tools in the past, and one he’s produced more recently is 321.It’s an online evangelistic tool.Now.I’m Pete Hughes, you’ve clicked on the Reach Australia podcast, and in this season we are looking at different evangelistic tools to fill your missional toolbox with as many resources as possible.
1:04
This is an interview that Derek Hannah did in 2024 for The One Thing, but we wanted to replay it to remind you again of what 321 is about and why it is such a great evangelistic tool.We picked this interview up where Glenn is talking about how he became a Christian.So I grew up in Canberra, in church, going home and I was the sort of teenager who gave their lives to Jesus every single time I was asked.
1:28
So I, I reckon that was about 1000 times.And I think I, I, I probably prayed every single day between about ages 13 and 17.I never really had a, a sense that God had accepted my prayers.I always felt like I was offering my myself to God, never got the sense that God had offered himself to me at all and went away to university to have as good a time as I could without him.
1:56
And and I think what brought me back was a friend just inviting me to church again and again.And we read through the Gospels and it it totally flipped the script on me in, in saying here is a God who offers himself to me.And yeah, so I don’t know when to date my conversion, whether it was at the beginning of the 1990s when I was that first earnest teenager.
2:20
I certainly didn’t understand the gospel then.But at the end of the 1990s, I definitely understood God’s love for me, the gift of Christ to me, and that it wasn’t so much me offering my life to God, It was Christ offering himself for me.And that gave me the the confidence and the the joy really, that that set my life on fire.
2:40
And that was whenever it was about 25 years ago.That’s great.Now we look, we haven’t even started the episode yet, but just ask one question related to the episode on that.Do you think that that how how you understand how you became a Christian, the things that impacted you?Do you think that has shaped how you do evangelism and approach evangelism now?
2:58
Massively and I think, I think talking to every evangelist, the way they came to faith ends up shaping the way they seek to, to lead others to Christ.And so for me, like the the Bible and, and getting the Gospels into people’s hands is so important because my friend did that with me.And I remember just being halfway through Luke’s gospel and seeing the towering personality of Jesus in the gospels.
3:17
And I was just like, that’s it.He’s he’s it, He’s Lord.That was so, so important to me.And it’s such a part of what my evangelism ends up being today, just kind of opening up the gospels, especially with people and pointing to the Christ of scripture and saying what about him and, and confronting people with, with him.
3:37
So, yeah, I think it’s, it’s unavoidable.But that the way you came to Christ will end up shaping the way you you lead others to Christ.And one of the big lessons for me is always just get scripture into people’s hands.Pester them, show them Jesus, dare them to to shoot up a prayer and say, you know Jesus, if you’re there, show yourself because that’s that’s certainly how he met me.
3:59
Now talk us a little bit, Glenn, through what speak life is you, you, you mentioned that at the end of the last episode when we spoke to you, it’s not just a course platform.There’s more to it and that where to come from, what does it do?How does it fit together?There was an existing charity before I joined it, but they hadn’t had an evangelist in post for 30 years.
4:20
There was a founder and he was a Billy Graham type called Eric Hutchings and he did the big crusades and he had a big radio ministry and it sort of laid dormant after he died.And then there was a legacy left and they had the money to employ another evangelist.So I’m, I’m the second evangelist to be employed by this, this charity with a 30 year gap in between.
4:40
And interestingly, I haven’t really had to change anything about the structures of the charity because it, it was formed in order to seek revival in the UK through preaching and media.And the media used to be radio.The media has changed now and we’re very much online.
4:58
We’re very much doing podcasts and, and YouTube especially, but that, that is still what we seek to do.We seek to make Christ known through, through preaching.And I, I do a lot of university missions and church based missions and through media and, and largely it’s, it’s a YouTube channel.
5:15
So people can go and subscribe to speak live media on, on YouTube or subscribe to our podcast to speak live podcast.And we’re still trying to do that, that same thing of, of making Jesus known.And if people really want to get a sense of who we are, we always say we’ll just go and do 321.
5:31
And I think when people see this evangelistic course, I think they’ll see the best of what Speak Life do, because it’s a resource for the church.It’s a resource that’s evangelistic, it’s media savvy, it looks great, and that it presents a theologically rich and profound vision for who Jesus is, that it might evangelize Christians and it might evangelize the friends of Christians.
5:54
And out it goes in that ripple effect.So to get a real handle on Speak Life, I think people can go to three two on course.com and just check out 321 because I think that’s really the heartbeat of the ministry.Now, Glenn, I’ve only just come across 321.Has it been around for a while?
6:11
In various forms.It’s been around since about 2011.So I right I I remember reading online.Kevin Deyoung did a little blog post on the The Gospel Coalition about how he would teach Worldview in 1234.And it was all about, you know, the there’s one God and then the two was there’s two elements, creator and creature. 3 was Trinity and four was something like God is for you in Christ or something like that.
6:37
And he just did that blog post and I just thought to myself, what would it look like to actually begin with the Trinity?And then I thought, well, you’d, you’d have to go backwards from there, wouldn’t you?So what’s 2?It has to be the two atoms, wouldn’t it?What’s 1?Union with Christ.And it all fell out into a blog post in 2011.And then a friend said, we’ve got to make a video about this.
6:55
And the video went viral and lots of people were kind of sharing it.And then ten of those got in touch and said, you know, could we make a book out of this?And so I made the book and then we made a short course that was just in three sessions.And that, that course, that old one’s been done by hundreds of churches and that’s, that’s, you know, over 10 years old now.
7:14
But we’ve always wanted to do a really properly good looking, attractive, digitally savvy version of the 321 course.And so in the version that you can see it at 321 course.com, it’s been around since October, but it’s been in the works for well over a decade.
7:33
It does seem like a very thoughtful course and it is it is really well produced.So I do recommend you go and check it out for yourself.But you mentioned that you’ve done a lot of university ministry.Is that, is that who you had in mind when you did this?Was the, the people who wouldn’t normally just pick up a book for the ten of those?
7:51
Or is it?Is it just for anybody?I think it’s it’s very much for, for, for anybody.It’s it’s very much for visual learners actually.So you know, my next door neighbors who I spoke about in the the last episodes, both of them have done the 321 course.
8:10
One of them became a Christian through it.The other one is still processing things.In fact, she’s she’s reading Love story at the moment, which is the book that we spoke of in the in the last episode, literally this week.You can pick and pray for her.She kind of processes that, you know, neither of those finished.Those guys finished high school and they are.
8:29
Yeah, they they have loved the visual aspects of 321 as immersing you in grander stories.Every episode begins with basically a a larger illustration.You start on a space station, for instance, and you don’t know how you got onto the space station, and it’s just asking people to look at life through the lens of Jesus.
8:53
And what I find is that people who aren’t used to dissecting texts, and really only university students, are used to dissecting texts.People who aren’t used to dissecting texts still have a lot to say in Group discussion.You’ve just got to figure out the questions to ask them.And if you’re asking them larger questions about life and the way life ticks, you’re engaging a lot more people than the university based discussions, which are, you know, more textually based and, and people are, are used to that, that kind of literate way of, of doing things.
9:22
So the ideas that I talk about in 321 deep ideas, they’re profound ideas.And so that, that definitely appeals to thinkers, But I, I didn’t want to just target university students.I think there’s, there’s lots of things that are targeted at university students.
9:39
I, I want, I want to target the, the larger proportion of society that are visual thinkers, that are big picture thinkers that don’t necessarily know how to read a text and to dissect the text, but who still have plenty to say about who is God and what is the meaning of life.
10:00
Yeah.And it is, it’s, it’s put together really simply the again, people can go on for free and, and see it, there’s kind of 88 courses, but it does fit in this 321 structure.Just talk us how you land.What is a three?What is the two?What is the one and why?
10:16
Why did you land with that structure particularly?Because there’s some pretty heavy concepts concepts in there.Yeah, well, I mean, so there’s there’s four larger sections.And if you do the course in person, it’s usually run over 4 weeks.The first week you do Jesus and then you do God, the world and you Jesus is the tour guide and he shows you life and life according to Jesus means the threeness of God, the twentess of the world, the oneness of you.
10:42
The threeness of God is Father, Son and Spirit.God is a loving union of three, Father, son and Spirit.And so having come to Jesus, we want to stand where he’s standing and understand God the way that he understands God.And and as I come to the Lord Jesus, I recognize that he is the son of the Father and full of the spirit.
11:01
He is in on a Niagara Falls of love and blessing.And when I stand where he’s standing, I come in on that love.Well, that’s, that’s a heck of a thing.Amazing.So that’s that’s the three Ness of God.But then I recognize that the world is not full of light, life and love.The world is full of darkness, death and disconnection.
11:18
Where does that come from?Well, Jesus represents life as it ought to be.Adam represents life as it actually is.And so the two are the two atoms, the two representatives of the world.And you might think that’s a little bit heavy.
11:34
Do we really get into like, Genesis 3?And actually in the course we do get into Genesis 3.And, and I think it’s a text that just unpacks the human condition in an unparalleled way.And I think it’s an extraordinary blessing to take people to Genesis 3, actually, and show them this story of humanity walking around the garden.
11:52
And he’s king of the world and he can go anywhere, do anything.And he screws things up with him.You know, as far as the story is concerned, he screws things up in a matter of hours, it seems.And you’re like, how ridiculous, but also how relatable.And people really get the Adam story and they can really see themselves in the Adam story.
12:11
And you kind of say, well, that’s that’s the human condition in Adam.Wouldn’t it be great to be in Christ because he is life as it’s meant to be?And then the final section is the oneness of you.You are born one with Adam and we come into this world united into his kind of selfish humanity, perishing in his perishing world.
12:30
But here is the call of Christ.He says, come be one with me.And I’ve just loved being able to finish this presentation by talking about union with Christ because as soon as you talk about union with Christ, the call to Christ is the call, Yes, to have your sins forgiven.Yes, to have feelings of hope and purpose in your life.
12:49
Yes, it’s to have heaven and not hell, but most profoundly, it is to have Christ himself.You know, the, the offer of Christ is Christ.The, the good gift of the gospel is not stuff.The good gift of the gospel is Christ himself.
13:05
And when we are one with him, we get his Father as our Father, his Spirit as our spirit, his future as our future.And what I’ve loved about doing evangelism with one at the end of it is it makes so much organic sense to then say, therefore, of course you want to walk now with Jesus.
13:21
Of course, discipleship makes all the sense in the world because you haven’t signed up to a package deal of blessings.You’ve gotten united in in a love marriage, as it were, with with Christ.And and so you can do marriage prep with people and you can say, look, if you come to Christ, it will mean XY and Z in the same way that you do that with couples.
13:40
And you say, if you get married to this other person, it’s not one and done and then see you later.It’s OK, I’m now going to do life with this person.So discipleship falls out of the gospel presentation and church is absolutely woven into this gospel presentation because the call to Christ is the call to be a member in his body.
13:58
And if you’re one with Jesus, you’re also one with all the other people who are one with Jesus.And so there’s an organic kind of, there’s a natural call to church at the end of a gospel presentation, which is not always the case in gospel presentations.Sometimes the, you know, the end of the gospel presentation might lead people to, to pray a prayer, but then it’s not always obvious to people.
14:17
A why should I now follow Jesus?And B, why should I go to church?But when you really spotlight union with Christ, I think you’ve answered those two questions in a in a really compelling way.We often talk about two conversions and I Pete’s got a question.
14:33
I’ll be true.We haven’t doing 2 conversions which pass over here.You say that about being converted to Christ and often people need to be converted to church as well in there.So it’s very helpful to hear there’s a monster for people even when they become Christians to understand why bother.Sorry, Pete.No, no, actually I wanted to follow up on that question as well and just say if people were, you know, it’s easy to get this course and it’s easy to grab it online and you know, I could see people share it with their Facebook friends, that sort of thing.
14:58
How do they get from the course to church?Like, I mean, if church is such an important thing, how do you see that happening from the course?Yeah, So we, we want to get better at that and we want to make the tech side of things really hook people in a couple of different ways.
15:14
There’s a Finder church aspect of of the website where people can can discover and it’s not just discovering churches that do 321, it’s discovering all a whole bunch of evangelical churches.However, we can add them to the database and that database is is growing.We also want to hook them into online community that then, you know, encourages them along the way towards church.
15:36
But it’s it’s a little bit like, you know the book we talked about my book love story last time we spoke together.And you know how you get, you know, someone from the book to church?Well, hopefully the person who shared the book with you is also the person inviting you to church on a Sunday and is involved in in that way.
15:53
And so having an online course is not the opposite of face to face in person discipleship and evangelism.Having a course is one more tool in the toolkit for the Christian to have so that you know, my, my two neighbors have done 321 both they’ve both done it online.
16:11
One of them has done it in person in our church.But the the idea that I’ve given them this online resource is not so that they can be cut free from face to face discipleship and just live in this other space called the digital realm.
16:27
Because the digital realm is not another space.The digital realm is where all of us are living all the time.My, my mother is 79 years old.She is an absolute Facebook queen.She’s an absolute WhatsApp queen.She lives online too.It’s, it’s everybody is always living online.
16:44
And in the same way that CS Lewis would write his books and have his radio broadcasts, we, you know, where is the mere Christianity for a digital age that actually makes sense to people in the way that they consume digital media.And that is not the opposite of in person discipleship.
17:00
You know, my, my neighbor, I got, I got her reading John’s gospel and the way I got her reading John’s Gospel is I was, I live next door to her.I still texted her the Bible app with a Bible reading plan from John’s Gospel that I’ve put together.And, and so you might think, OK, so I’ve cut her loose from in person, you know, evangelism by sending her the app.
17:21
No, no, no.That night at 9 PMI got a knock on the door and she comes and she thrusts her her computer, her phone screen in my face and she points to John chapter 2 verse four.And she says why is Jesus calling his mother woman?
17:39
She’s like my son called me woman.He would do it once once and we got into this hilarious conversation about it and and I think she was satisfied with the answer that I gave her in the end.But it just goes to show for me, like in person evangelism and online evangelism are not 2 separate realms at all because we all live a digital life alongside our in personal life.
18:06
I just hope that I hope that the online aspect of this serves your in person evangelism actually.And the course is set up like that, isn’t it?Because I so I’ve been doing it by myself and the videos allow me time to watch and very high production value.
18:22
Let’s be time to watch.You’ll say something, but there’s time for pause.Here’s a question.And the video actually plays and there’s a space for pausing or I can pause it as well.So it does allow me to do it by myself as well as you can run it in a church context as well.Actually when you run it in a.
18:40
There is there is that concern, isn’t there, that OK, so people can now just experience Jesus in a, in a me and Jesus moment.And wouldn’t that be a real shame?And I, I totally hear that.And our, and our great heart is that that will through its theology and through the tech sides of things and through the fact that hopefully it’s a Christian friend that shared this with you.
19:02
There’ll be all sorts of pathways from that me and Jesus moments to church and to on on, you know, offline.When when you run it in church, is it is it run like do you just run the videos?Like it’s just like basically the same thing but just on a big screen?
19:18
Is that how it works?Yeah.And and obviously the the discussion times at times in in table groups and that kind of thing.And what we, what we’re really finding is that people really prize this as an added extra for your in person, you know, church courses.
19:37
We, we run, for instance, a monthly thing called Ask Glenn anything.And you can, so you can ask the presenter of the course any question that you’ve got.And people kind of dial in from all around the world to ask me questions, the questions that are being thrown up on, on the, you know, table discussion groups in, in churches, all the kind of questions that they have if they’re just doing it solo.
19:58
But we, we find that having that added extra kind of digital sense of, of, of resources is a real bonus for, for running the course.You know you you can do alpha, but you can’t ask Nikki Gumbel anything.You can run 321 and you can ask the presenter of 321 and, and you can get hooked into an online community where people are day by day asking questions and answering each other’s questions and journeying along with it.
20:23
We want to add to this, a podcast.We’re going to add to this other courses like the Air We Breathe course and, and, and other resources.And so, yeah, this is not meant to be taking you away from the in person course, but we think that it’s an added extra that might be it might be attractive to church leaders to to say, come, come every Tuesday night and we’ll fresh it out in table groups.
20:45
But you can also join this online community and be thinking through these these questions on a on a day by day basis as well.Yeah, it’s great.Let me let me just as we we close up here, we’ll put a whole bunch of links to some things you’ve mentioned in the show notes here.
21:01
What, What’s the one thing you’re saying around 321 evangelism for you?As for church leaders, that often we’re engaging with the three to one for evangelism is helpful.What would you want them to think about?Well, we’ve already spoken about the, in a former podcast, we, we spoke about kind of the threeness of God and we spoke about God is love and how important that is.
21:23
And, and in this episode, I’ve, I’ve spoken about union with Christ and how important that is.So let let me do the other number that I haven’t mentioned so much is the 2 the the Tunis of the world as shaped by Adam and Christ.
21:39
And I, I think really pressing into that is so important in a very individualistic age.We we say that we love authenticity and yet we don’t want to confess to our own mistakes.
21:58
And being called a Sinner is incredibly confronting for us.But I I think that there is in the Adams story a subversive fulfillment of our real desire to to actually to truly be authentic and to truly own that I am a Sinner and that’s why I sin all the time.
22:17
That authenticity really plays with people, the idea of community.Again, modern people love the idea of community, the practice of it less so, but we love the idea of community.And again, there’s a subversive fulfillment as we talk about our communal identity in Adam and our communal identity in Christ.
22:35
It really cuts against Western individualism and it tells me that I, I am, I am not an atomized individual making my way in the world.I’m part, I’m in the same boat as everybody else.And actually that cuts against my individualism and I find that very confronting, but it also gives me that sense of real belonging to other people.
22:55
And in the body of the church, suddenly I find my identity, not by looking within myself to scrape my heart for, you know, feelings and desires and making my identity all about those, but but actually looking outwards to Christ and looking outwards to to the church body to find where I truly belong.
23:16
And and we’re just finding that that pressing into what humanity is really like and we’re not these atomized individuals is so important in evangelism.And actually a lot of evangelistic presentations do kind of can consider just the atomized individual and my individual plight before God, which is a very important thing.
23:40
And it does need to get personal.And I do need to understand that no one else faith, no one else’s faith saves me.I am accountable before God and I, I need to, you know, have I need to be at peace with the living God.And so that’s important in evangelism.
23:55
But sometimes we can lose that sense of the corporate in our evangelistic presentations.And that has all kinds of discipleship implications as well.So, so yeah, I, I think the three is vital in evangelism.I think the one is a is vital in evangelism.I think the two is vital in evangelism.
24:12
And really, if 321 sees a whole bunch of non Christians come to Christ, my goodness, I will, I will praise God.And and we’re we’re seeing that and we’re praising God for that.But I also want 321 to evangelize evangelism and I want to see the goodness of three and two and one and May 321 itself perish.
24:32
But if if the three and the two and the one infuse themselves into the evangelism of the church, then I’ll praise God.Well, that was the 321 online tool.It’s got its advantages, it’s got its disadvantages, but make sure you at least have a look at the link to the course, which is in the show notes.
24:50
I’m Pete Hughes, chat soon.
