HOW TO SEE LIFE:
A Guide in 321
By Glen Scrivener
10 Publishing. 192 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 915 705 495
The 321 Course has been available for over a decade. If it is unfamiliar to you, it is a user-friendly course that can be taken in person or online.
It takes an innovative approach to communicating the gospel. The 3 stands for the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who move towards us in transforming love, the 2 stands for us in relationship to the first and the last Adam, and the 1 stands for our union with Jesus our champion.
How to See Life is a companion to the 321 Course. It does a similar job to the 2014 book 321 The Story of God, The World and You, but although it covers the same ground it does so a freshness that has been shaped by a decade of observing how the material has been used and assessing how it might land in 2024. So, what is different?
1. The layout has an attractive contemporary feel and uses a font that is pleasing to the eye and easy to read.
2. The book makes more extensive use of QR codes for access to online content than the previous course book. Although this book is valuable as a stand-alone evangelistic book, the fact that it is linked to so much useful online content makes it an invaluable tool for evangelism.
3. The book is written with the use of some fresh and innovative storytelling. The reader is taken to, amongst other places, a space-station, a football stadium, and a Second World War battleground. Scrivener talks about the importance of reframing: ‘It is about changing perspectives in order to look at life again.’ The stories are an effective way of reframing the way readers see their world so that they might be helped to really see life in a new way.
4. The FAQ section covers 12 questions that non-Christians might be asking. What is interesting and so helpful about this section is that the questions are framed in a way that is similar to the way a non-Christian might express them. For example, the last question is: ‘What about Christianity’s outdated and bigoted views?’ The style of the answers is also interesting. Each answer is set within a story, in an attempt to reframe the question to help the questioner see things differently. This is briefly and brilliantly done on the two contentious issues of abortion and sex. There is something beautifully subversive about using the weirdness of Christianity as a way to commend its wisdom.
This book shows many signs of a writer who knows the gospel message well and has paid attention to how to land it well in the third decade of the 21st century and beyond. This is a very good tool to put into the evangelistic toolbox. I am sure that many people will see life as a result of reading it and accessing the online course.
Church leaders and preachers would benefit from reading the book as a prompt to how to see clearly through the lens of Scripture in readiness to communicate its message with clarity to a contemporary audience. I was instructed by the way that the author reflects the storytelling God by engaging readers with stories that reframe the way we think and see. The author does not merely use storytelling to soften up the reader for the gospel punchline; the stories instead follow the grain of the universe in reflecting a God who tells the greatest story ever told and was willing to step into the heart of that story. We all need help in learning to see, think, imagine and speak differently (incidentally a companion volume How to Speak Life, is expected later this year).
