A lesson from the Third World: Nicaraguans challenge Canadian Presbyterians to be more tolerant. (From the moderator).

The horses strutted up the street, their hooves raising clouds of dust. A caravan of vehicles followed slowly: battered farm pickups and luxury Land Cruisers in roughly equal numbers. The kick-off to this year's presidential campaign in rural Nicaragua.

A strange conglomeration, not only of cars but also of politicians. Left-leaning candidates, stumbling heirs to the revolution, together with former members of the National Guard who had once served the right-wing dictatorship. These people or their ancestors, once locked in deadly combat, had tortured and killed each other for decades. They brought histories of torture, summary executions, political verbiage, clandestine prisons and cemeteries. And they brought it all to the same platform -- flags of the revolutionaries interspersed with flags of the National Guard and flags of those who took up guns and planted landmines to topple both.

I never expected to hear these words: 'There is room in this country for all of us. There is room for the National Guard. There is room for the revolutionary. There is room for the contras." To hear a revolutionary proclaim that there is room in the country for the National Guard, well, that truly is revolutionary.

If politics makes strange bedfellows, this year's presidential election is no exception. And, of course, campaigns everywhere bring out the rhetoric and the pretty dialogues. But something has changed, and that something inspires a great hope.

No one doubts Nicaraguans will vote in November and those elections, while probably marred by isolated irregularities, will be more or less fair. Many lament the dearth of honest politicians and alternative visions and dreams, but the vote will happen. There may not be much to choose, but the freedom to choose is an enormous advance. People have worked hard for this - people from the left and from the right who love their country. These people may not like each other but they have agreed, for this election at least, to bury the hatchet.

Which brings me to the church we love and serve. In some ways, I think we, too, have learned to be more tolerant. More and more of us come from different cultural communities. We worship in a rich diversity of languages. Like our land, our church has been woven from a wide variety of backgrounds, languages and cultures. What an amazing tapestry!

Many of our congregations -- not all, by any means, and not enthusiastically enough -- try to welcome the youth. We have finally discovered our children are not the church of the future but the church of today. That is good.

Indeed, I stand in a Nicaraguan village today surrounded by Canadian youth. They hail from one of our congregations whose passion for mission has led them to support their kids. Mission Education and Youth in Mission have a program to provide exposure tours and work experiences for Presbyterian youth and adults. We await visitors with open arms. No need to go beyond our church to savour such good experiences.

We may not like the paper it's printed on or the size of the type, but most of us have embraced even the new hymn-book with -- might I say -- "grudging enthusiasm." This is good, too.

Nicaraguans challenge us, I think, to greater tolerance of theological diversity. I sense a certain hardening of positions and even an incipient intolerance across the church.

A great Nicaraguan poet wrote, "If the country is small, you have to dream that it is big." That is true of our church. We may not be large, but our vision looms enormous. We grow in our diversity of age, race, culture and language. Let us also grow in tolerance. Room abounds for all who love Christ and the vision to which he invites us.