Forty years ago tonight President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not be available for renomination as president. If you are old enough to have been a political junkie on that evening, you remember how stunned you were, staring at the TV screen! Historians have revealed that Johnson had not even told his aides that he would say that. Johnson made the announcement at the end of a speech on the Vietnam war that was carried nationally on all three networks. (How quaint to think of only three networks. During those minutes that night, there was nothing else you could watch on TV!)

This week 40 years ago was tumultuous and tragic. Forty years ago this coming Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Indeed, many historians consider 1968 to have been the worst year in American history. It was also the year of the Tet Offensive, the destruction in many cities following the assassination of the Rev. Dr. King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention,...

The late 60s and early 70s changed the rules for the Church -- and many congregations are still wandering in that wilderness. That era was the beginning of the end of peoples' church-going habit because "it's the thing that respectable people do." Now, what's important for most folks is the spiritual journey, in a culture that offers a plethora of competing spiritual paths. What makes for a vibrant congregation now? In my opinion, it is a congregation in which people realize that the spiritual journey is not something that we take in solitude, but in interdependence, in mutuality, in community. It is a congreation in which there is encouragement to practice the faith, not only as something intellectually interesting on Sunday mornings, but also as a daily way of life that encompasses not only spiritual health, but emotional and physical health as well. A vibrant congregation is full of people who are engaging in daily faith practices -- prayer, engagement with Scripture, fellowship with faith partners -- that cultivate the awareness of the constant presence of God. Receiving that grace leads to humility, it seems to me, and servanthood, and compassion.

What a force in the world the church can be, if Christians act each day according to those virtues! What an opportunity God is giving us.