Glen Scrivener: It's Not My Life Given to Jesus, It's His Life Given For Me

Two days after Glen Scrivener prayed a reckless, bravado-filled prayer — “God, if it means knowing you better, then bring on the suffering” — his girlfriend left him, his UK visa was refused, and a long-hidden family secret that would end his parents’ marriage broke into the open, all in the same week.

In this vulnerable and insightful conversation, Glen tells the whole strange, funny and painful story of his life, faith, and ministry, and the times when God came and found him.

From praying a Gethsemane-style prayer every day as a teenager, to a cricket career that fell just short of an Oxford Blue, to a father whose long-hidden affairs shaped Glen’s own image of God, and the years he and his wife Emma spent walking through her life-threatening battle with anorexia — Glen’s life has been marked by one recurring, helpful reminder: I am not Jesus.

Listener note: this episode discusses eating disorders. Please take care while listening.

About Glen Scrivener

Glen Scrivener is the CEO of Speak Life, a UK-based evangelistic ministry with roots stretching back to 1952. Raised in Canberra, Glen studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, where he played cricket at a high level before walking away from a faith he says he’d never really understood as a teenager. He returned to faith in his early twenties through a friend’s simple invitation to read Luke’s gospel, and went on to work at All Souls Langham Place in London and study at Oak Hill Theological College. He is the author of The Air We Breathe and lives in the UK with his wife Emma and their two children.

Key Moments & Highlights

His grandmother, then General Secretary of the NSW Communist Party, walked forward and gave her life to Christ at Billy Graham’s 1959 Sydney crusade

Speak Life spent 28 years as “an evangelistic organisation with no evangelist” after founder Eric Hutchings died in 1982, until a legacy left in 2010 funded Glen’s role.

As a teenager, Glen prayed to give his life to Jesus “again and again,” checking a bathroom mirror for a halo that never came — a striving he now traces to misreading Gethsemane as a call to copy Jesus rather than be rescued by him.

A hidden family crisis — his father’s repeated affairs, uncovered when Glen was seven — shaped a vision of God as distant and unreachable: “you can knock, knock, knock on heaven’s door, nobody’s home.”

The moment everything flipped: a friend reading Gethsemane with him said, “Glen, you are not Jesus in this passage — you are Peter,” and Glen realised the gospel was Christ’s life given for him, not his life given to Christ.