Your Overview Effect

When Perspective Changes Identity

What would you do if you became aware of something quietly and insidiously weakening the Western church; something it neither sees nor expects?

Two years ago, I began seeing it in my own life, and it sent me into deep reflection and repentance, and dropping off Substack for a season (see my post, Back From Arabia). Now, profoundly changed personally, I face the challenge of communicating it to a church that I fear is too preoccupied to hear a message it doesn’t think it needs to hear.

After all, that’s the way I was … before I heard the message myself.

The Overview Effect

When NASA started sending humans into space, they experienced what’s come to be known as the Overview Effect. Their entire way of looking at life and their perception of reality—and of themselves—shifted dramatically and permanently after looking down on the Earth from space.

The overview effect results in profound cognitive shifts, often in the form of feelings of awe, unity and a renewed sense of responsibility. Some astronauts gained “an instant global consciousness ... an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it” (Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, 1971). Others said they no longer see national borders, and struggle to see the reasoning behind the usual international disagreements (Jim Lovell, Apollo 13). ISS astronaut Chris Hadfield poignantly summarized it: “You see the world as a whole, and no perspective that you’ve ever had before can match that.”

The astronauts didn’t receive new information. They received a new vantage point.

This is the opportunity awaiting the church in the West: We have the opportunity to experience our own overview effect of who God is, who we are as his image bearers and what in the world God is up to. We have been operating from a limited perspective, unable to see things as they truly are. And so we live and minister ineffectively, separated from what God is doing around us.

Be encouraged: There is a vantage point from which can get the perspective we need.

But also be aware: Getting there will require some changes that very few of us have ever considered before.

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The Crossroads

The Western church is at a crossroads. We must come to terms with the reality that, for most of our history, we have been practicing a uniquely modern and Western practice of idolatry. By idolatry, I don’t mean the worship of pagan statues. I’m referring to the functional reliance on something other than God as the source of life and identity.

As harsh and Chicken-Little as this may sound, it has come upon us as most idolatry “opportunities” do: gradually, insidiously, deceptively and—I fully believe—unintentionally. Despite the best of our intentions, the church in the West is following Jesus with an active mindset of independence from him.

“Idolatry” may sound like a hyper-religious, alarmist rant. I assure you it is not. I didn’t discover this by analyzing others. I discovered it because God exposed it in me. This message comes from significant personal repentance, so I hope you hear it as a solution to a longing you’ve been trying to fulfill for years.

This solution requires a dramatic transformation of how you see yourself—your identity. This may feel threatening at first, like: “You are less than you think you are.” But the “threat” is actually a loving invitation from God. Because only in realizing that we are less than we think we are will we discover that we are more than we ever thought we could be.

Where This Is Going

I realize that the claim of idolatry requires some substance to be credible. To that end, there are three themes I use as the scaffold for building the case for the need for our overview effect: Identity, Idolatry and Ideology. Each is a full topic on its own, but it’s the interaction of all three that gives us the perspective we need.

Identity

Identity is the essence of who we are, the most basic existential aspect of being human. Identity answers the question: Who am I, before I do anything? It is the organizing principle for life, creating the coherence we need to comprehend reality.

Human identity has two dimensions: 1) an individual dimension, and 2) a communal dimension in relationship to God and to other people. Both the individual and communal dimensions of our identity are operating simultaneously (a critically important fact truth we usually miss).

God has an identity as well. His name (“I am that I am”) reveals his self-evidence. In other words, “God is”; he exists. His identity is a proclamation: There’s no time or place where God isn’t God. That “God is” means he’s not something we invented, he’s something we orient ourselves to.

We were created in God's image, so our identity is intimately and inescapably tied to his. So misunderstanding God's identity automatically confuses our own, and misunderstanding our identity automatically confuses our perception of God's identity.

It’s this skewed perception of identity (both God’s and ours) that is the foundation for idolatry. In short, we don’t have an idolatry behavior problem, we have an identity perception problem.

Idolatry

We usually think of idolatry as pagan societies carving images to deify things like animals, stars or emperors. As a modern society, we presume that we’ve progressed beyond such primitive ways. But this exposes our functional ignorance of idolatry.

Idolatry is elevating a person, object, idea or desire to a place of functional authority in one's life—replacing God as our source of all identity, meaning, purpose and passion. “Functional authority” means the thing we most rely on for our stability and effectiveness in life, which usually defaults to things that we can control.

This control exposes idolatry’s true engine: self-reliant autonomy; the work of our own hands. The most typical expression of identity is combining the functional trust in self with the outward religious trust in God. The Old Testament prophets, for example, admonished Israel not for worshiping Baal instead of Yahweh, but for worshiping Baal as part of trusting Yahweh.

In Western cultures that run on independent, individualistic self-actualization and materialism, it’s insidiously easy to seek God’s help as we pursue being the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul—in Jesus’ name, amen.

Ideology

I use the term ideology to describe the paradigms we live by, which are based on identity and the practice of (or rejection of) idolatry. Ideology includes not just what we think, but how we think and how we apply those thoughts in our lives.

Ideology is based on the function of our physical brains—it’s not just philosophical, it’s neurological. Our brains are not neutral instruments; they are historically conditioned pattern-forming organs. The way we have learned to think shapes not just our perception, but our very ability to perceive.

Without renewal and consistent attention, our brains are rarely neutral and unbiased. This area of renewing our minds is perhaps the most significant change facing the church. Will we be willing to correct our thinking habits that we presume to be healthy and aligned with truth?

So What?

I anticipate that the Western church’s idolatry will be the primary focus of my writing for the near term. I will be working through the variety of issues related to identity, idolatry and ideology that will be a part of my upcoming book project, Mind Your Faith. I invite you to explore them with me.

Idolatry is a bit of a paradox: It’s childishly simple in principle, yet massively complex in practice—which makes it easy for our enemy to weave his deceptive influence below the radar of our attention.

The subject of idolatry is, of course, a serious one, with an obviously ominous overtone that should be considered soberly. At the same time, I can attest to the truth that repenting from it has been the most invigorating experience of my spiritual life.

I’m confident that I’m not alone in these kinds of experiences. And I’m confident that by embracing its overview effect opportunity, the church in the West will be in position to be used of God in ways it has never seen before.

Let us strive, by his grace, for such an outcome.

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