It’s a simple online course to help you explain the gospel to people. Glen Scrivener talks about his course 3,2,1 which can be done online. You can do it with someone or pass on the link for someone to do it themselves.
- Speak Life is a ministry to make Jesus known
- The development of 3,2,1 has not been overnight but has been a project from 2011
- This is course for anyone, but especially for visual learners
- 3: the trinity, 2: the 2 Adams of the world, 1: you are united with Adam or united with Jesus, the new Adam
- While it is online the key is connecting people to churches and Christian relationships from the online community
TOOL BOX:
348: A Love Story to Give Away (Glen Scrivener)
CREDITS:
Cross Beam Communications
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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.
G’day.I’m Derek.Hannah.I’m Pete Hughes.Welcome to the One Thing podcast designed to give you one solid practical tip for gospel centred ministry.Every single week the One Thing is brought to you by Reach Australia, our vision.As you know, we would love to see thousands of healthy evangelistic multiplying churches.
You might be wondering why do you need to say evangelism and multiplying if you just staying healthy and always saying is we wanna see not only healthy foods we know healthy 33 people but our heart is to reach people in ever increasing numbers across Australia that be their vision.That’s a hard and that is what we’re seeing across the network thanks to God with this a number of Avengers and courses out there that our church is within our networks use at the moment.
We’re gonna bring you one more today we have on this podcast again 321 hosted by Glen Scrivener.You’re going to learn a little bit more about that produced by Speak Life.We’ll talk about that a little bit more.Welcome, Glenn.Great to have you again.
Hello, Thank you, Derek.Excellent.Now good your early we’ve spoke to a few weeks ago.Could you tell us just briefly, how did you become a Christian?So I grew up in Canberra in a church going home, and I was a sort of teenager who gave their lives to Jesus every single time I was asked.
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.
And and I think what brought me back was a friend just invited me to church again and again and we read through the Gospels and it it totally flipped the script on me in in seeing 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 Ernest teenager.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.And that was whenever it was about 25 years ago.That’s great.Now, we haven’t started the episode here, but just ask one question.Lady, you have side on that.
Do you think that that how how you understand how you became a Christian, these things have impacted you.Do you think that has shaped how you do evangelism and approach evangelism now?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.And I was just like Batsy, It’s he’s, he’s, he’s, 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.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.Yeah, that’s beautiful.
Well, that’s a great leading to this episode of The One Thing 321 Avengers and online.Today’s podcast is brought to you by Crossbeam.Reach and impact more people With help from Crossbeam Communications, your trusted Christian communications agency, these guys deliver powerful storytelling and marketing solutions rooted in faith.
Visit crossbeam.com dot AU And now back to the podcast.Now took us a little bit Glenn, through what speak like is you you you mentioned that the end of last episode when we spoke to you not just cause platform there’s more to it in that where that 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.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 2nd evangelist to be employed by this, this charity with a 30 year gap in between.And interestingly I haven’t really had to change anything about the structures of the charity because it it was forms 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.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 so people can go and subscribe to speak Life media on on YouTube or subscribe to our podcast to speak life 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, well, 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 and that it it, it presents a theologically rich and profound vision for who Jesus is, that it might evangelise Christians and it might evangelise 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.The client I’ve only just come across 321.Has it been around for a while?
In various forms.It’s been around since about 2011.So I right.I I remember reading online Kevin de Young 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.
Three was Trinity and four was something like God is for you in Christ or something like that.And he just did that blog post.And I 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 oht?
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 gotta make a video about this.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 ones been done by hundreds of churches.
And that’s that’s, you know, over 10 years old now.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.
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 that the people who wouldn’t normally just pick up a book for the ten of those?
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 neighbours who I spoke about in the the last episodes both of them have done the 321 course.
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 you can pray for her.She kind of processes that you know neither of those those guys finished high school and they are 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 into the space station and it’s just asking people to look at life through the lens of Jesus.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 and the way life takes, you’re engaging a lot more people than the university based discussions which are you know more textually based and and people are used to that that kind of literate way of of doing things.
So the ideas that I talk about in 3/2 run deep ideas that 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 lots of things that are targeted at university students.
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.
And it is.It’s it’s put together really simply.The again, people can go for free and reach and see it.There’s kind of 8-8 courses, but it does fit in this 321 structure.Just talk us how you learn.What’s the three, What is the two, What is the one and why did you land with that structure?
Heavy concepts, concepts in there.Yeah, well, I mean so the 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 in you.Jesus is the tour guide and he shows you life.
And life according to Jesus means the threeness of God, the toughness of the world, the oneness of you.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.He’s standing and understand God the way that he understands God.
And and as I come to the Lord Jesus, I recognise that he is the Son of the Father and full of the Spirit.He is in on a Niagara Falls of love and blessing.And when I stand where he standing, I come in on that love.Well, that’s that’s a heck of a thing.Amazing.So that’s that’s the threeness of God.
But then I recognise that the world is not full of light, life and love.The world is full of darkness, death and disconnection.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.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.And he’s king of the world and he can go anywhere, do anything.And he’s throws things up within, you know as far as the story is concerned, it 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 Adams story 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.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.Yes, it’s to have heaven and not hell.But most profoundly, it is to have Christ himself.
You know, the the author of Christ is Christ.The the good gift of the gospel is not stuff.The good gift of the gospel is Christ himself.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.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.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.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 presentation.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.
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’ve been talking about two conversions and Pete’s got a question that we throw 2 conversion which passes over.
You say that that 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 mind to put people, even when they become Christians, understand why bother sorry people.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 she’s a grab it online and you know, I could see people sharing with their Facebook friends, that sort of thing.
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 wanna get better at that and we wanna make the tech side of things really hook people in a couple of different ways.
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 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.
But it’s it’s a little bit like you know the book we we talked about the book love story like 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
And so having an online course is not the opposite of face to face in person discipleship and evangelism.Having, of course, is one more tool in the toolkit for the Christian to have.So that you know, my, my, my 2 neighbours have done 321 both.
They’ve both done it online.One of them has done it in person in our church, but 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.
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 every everybody is always living online.
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.
You know, my my neighbour, I got, I got her reading John’s Gospel.And the way I got her reading John’s gospel is I was I lived next door to her.I still texted her the Bible app with a Bible reading plan from John’s gospel that I’ve 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.
No, no, no.That night at 9:00 PM I get a knock on the door and she comes and she thrusts her her computer, her 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?
She’s like, I 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 yeah, it it just goes to show for me, like in person evangelism and online evangelism are not two separate realms at all because we all live a digital life alongside our universe and life.
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, less me time to watch
You’ll say something, there’s time to 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 contact as well.But actually kind of when you run it in.
A.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’s shared this with you.
There’ll be all sorts of pathways from that, me and Jesus moments to church and so on on, you know?Absolutely.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?
Is that how it works?Yeah and and obviously the the discussion times are at times in in table groups and that kind of thing And what we what we really finding is that people really prize this as an added extra for your in person you know church courses.
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 their you know.People discussion groups in in churches or the kind of questions that they have if they’re just doing it solo but we we find that having that added extra kind of did 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, you can ask the presenter of 321 and you can get hooked into an online community where people are day by day asking questions and answering other questions and journeying along with it.
We wanna add to this a podcast.We’re gonna add to this other courses like the Air We Breathe course and 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 thrash it out in table groups.
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 Shanacy.
What what’s the one thing you’re seeing around 3:00 to 1:00, Avengers.And for you is for church leaders that often we’re engaging with that 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.
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.The one that I haven’t mentioned so much is the 2, the the 2 units of the world as shaped by Adam and Christ.
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.
And being called the Sinner is incredibly confronting for us.But I I think that there is in the Adams story, a subversive fulfilment 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.
What’s time that authenticity really plays with people, The idea of community.Again, modern people love the idea of community, the practise of it, and less so.But we love the idea of community.And again, there’s a subversive fulfilment as we talk about our communal identity in Adam and our communal identity in Christ.
It really cuts against Western individualism.And it tells me that 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 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.
And and we’re just planning that, that pressing into what humanity is really like and we’re not these atomised individuals is so important in evangelism.And actually a lot of evangelistic presentations do kind of consider just the atomized individual and my individual plight before God, which is in a very important thing.
And it does need to get personal.And I do need to understand that no one else, 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.
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 and evangelism.I think the one is a is vital in evangelism.I think the two is vital in evangelism.
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 evangelise evangelism, and I want to see the goodness of three and two and one, and may 321 itself perish.
But if if the Three and the Two and the One infuse themselves into the evangelism of the Church, then I’ll praise God.I mean, and look, we are very, very thankful for.Are you straddle both worlds out?We’re very thankful for our brothers and sisters in the UK who we might be for a long time and we wanna see lots of people where the Gospels come from for us.
For a lot of us in the UK gospel flood back in there as well as reaching Australia.So we’re thankful for this and their pros the same as yours that lots of people come to know Jesus.Because if thanks your time, Glenn, great to have you on.Bless you.Thanks, Derek.Thanks.Bye.Now just to mention a couple of things that that Glenn mentioned the toolbox here I will put a link to the course link it’s it’s on speaklock.org.uk if you wanna go and have a look but we’ll have a link there.
We’ll put a video of the course primarily as well whole bunch other books that Glenn has written will be on that and link to that web page.I want to throw one more in this world government be passing comment which I think if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking how do these Speak life organisations get set up.
He made a comment to a benefactor who many, many years ago invested financial resources so that he could do what he’s doing, which will impact the UK and far beyond.We wanna see hundreds more people as well.Some people may not be the glance screen and evangelist upfront, but many people will have the resources to support someone like a Glen across the globe, not just for the next five years but for the next 100 hundred years.
If you’ve got someone like that, this may be something to just plant that seed of how they use what they have now for eternal purposes.So anyway, just wanted to put that out there.Anyway, if you’ve got another topic you’d like us to cover, email us at [email protected] dot AU.I’m Derek.
Anna.Hi, Pete.Hughes.Chadsey.I’m not usually critiqued as much as this when I do it.So really very tender.Yeah, yeah.Yeah.We’ll.
We’ll have marriage counselling later.
