From a ‘closed’ to an ‘open’ take

How do you pray when you’re standing at a hospital bed? 

Often, we pray with comforting words, asking for inner strength or resilience, but leaving little room for God to act beyond what medicine and human effort can achieve. It is a way of speaking that assumes that the physical world is all that is, even while borrowing the language of faith. 

In contrast, we could pray in such a way that does not deny the importance of doctors, medicine, or the body’s natural processes, but also dares to name God as living and present in that room. This kind of prayer leaves space for healing that transcends our control, for peace that comes from beyond ourselves, for God’s companionship in both recovery and death. In that moment, the words we choose, whether they gesture only to human resources or whether they open to the possibility of divine agency, become a mirror of how we understand the world itself.

We live in what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes as a "secular bubble”. It's an environment where life can seem to make complete sense without God. Science explains how things work, psychology explains why people behave as they do, economics explains our struggles, and technology promises solutions to our problems. Everything appears to have a natural explanation that doesn't require divine involvement.

This isn't necessarily all bad. These explanations are often true and helpful. The challenge, however, is that we can begin to live as if this natural world is all there is, as if reality is a closed system where God has no real place.

But here's Taylor's important insight: we have a choice about how we live within this reality. One option is to adopt what he calls a "closed" take. This is to assume that only the things we can measure and control are real. God is pushed to the margins, perhaps a nice idea for comfort, but not someone who actually does anything in the world. A second approach is to choose an "open" take. This is to acknowledge that natural explanations make sense, but they leave genuine room for God's presence and action. They live with what we might call “holy curiosity”, ready to see God's hand in the ordinary moments of life.

The crucial point is this: both approaches require a kind of faith. The closed take pretends to be obvious common sense, but it's actually making a big assumption, which is that the material world is all there is. The open take is more honest about being a leap of trust, but it's a leap made with humility and hope.

Taylor also says we live in an age of "competing pressures." Even people who don't believe in God sometimes feel haunted by the possibility of something more. And even people who do believe sometimes feel the heavy pull of doubt and the temptation to rely only on what they can see and control.

Western Christians are more closed than we realise

Lutheran scholar Andrew Root, who led my conference last week, writes about how many churches and pastors, even while espousing an open take, actually function with a closed take. They say they believe in God, but operate as if God isn't really active. They focus primarily on strategies, programs, marketing, and measurable results. They operate as if everything depends entirely on our creativity, our hard work, our ability to stay relevant? When we do this, we're unconsciously adopting that "closed" take: treating God as at best a mascot for our human efforts. This way of doing church leaves everyone exhausted. Deep down, we stop truly believing because the unspoken message is that it all depends on us. We become just another organisation trying to survive in a competitive marketplace.

It is also entirely possible for us as individuals to espouse an open take with our lips while living functionally with a closed take in practice. We might sincerely affirm that God is present, powerful, and active, yet organise our daily life and decisions as if everything ultimately rests on our own control. Our prayers become perfunctory, more about calming ourselves than genuinely expecting God to intervene. Our sense of success or failure becomes measured only by productivity, efficiency, or approval, rather than by trust in God’s hidden work. In this way, belief in an open world of transcendence is confessed as doctrine, but the actual habits of attention, speech, and imagination remain sealed within a world closed off from the divine. The danger is not hypocrisy so much as quiet accommodation: faith in theory, but functional unbelief in practice.

A Different Way Forward

So how can we become communities that embody the "open" take. This doesn't mean being passive or lazy. It means actively cultivating a posture of expectation and receptivity. It means:

• Speaking boldly about God as real and active - not just as a concept or feeling, but as someone who genuinely works in our world today

• Looking for God's presence in ordinary events - being willing to interpret what happens to us and around us through the lens of faith

• Slowing down - resisting our culture's frantic pace to make space for listening, reflection, and genuine encounter with God and each other

• Focusing on depth rather than just growth - caring more about spiritual and relational connection with each other and with God, rather than cultural relevance and marketing and numbers.

This might mean choosing to pray with a posture that assumes God is actually hearing and responding, not just as a spiritual exercise. It might mean sharing stories of how you’ve seen God at work, even in small ways. It might mean making decisions based on prayer and discernment, not just on what seems strategic or logical.

In our Sunday worship, it could look like taking time to really listen to God’s voice in Scripture, to each other, and to the Spirit's movement among us. It might mean being honest about our doubts and struggles while still maintaining hope that God is present in them.

Most radically, it means becoming a community of witnesses: people who dare to claim that the living God is still at work in our world, even when that seems foolish to others.

Adopting an open take is not the same as living in naïve optimism or expecting constant flashes of the miraculous. It requires a nuanced and mature faith that can hold the tension of believing God is active while acknowledging that much of life unfolds through ordinary, natural processes. An open take must resist the temptation to collapse back into a closed frame when God’s presence feels hidden, while also avoiding the immaturity of seeing God only in the spectacular. It is a posture that learns to discern God’s subtle movements in both joy and suffering, in both answered prayer and lingering silence. Such maturity means being able to confess doubt without collapsing into despair, to hope without demanding certainty, and to rest in the mystery that God’s ways often exceed our categories. In this way, an open take becomes less about clinging to proofs and more about cultivating trust, patience, and attentiveness to the God who is present even when unseen.

Faith in our secular age isn't about escaping the modern world, but about how we choose to live within it. The question isn't whether we can avoid the pressures and explanations of our time - we can't. The question is whether we'll live with hearts closed to God's possibilities, anxiously trying to secure meaning and success through our own efforts, or with hearts open to the presence and action of the living God.

For Merri Creek, this means refusing to be just another institution managing programs and competing for attention and market share. Instead, we can become a community of disciples who wait with patience, speak with honesty about both our faith and our doubts, and live with genuine hope that God is still active among us.