Blood, Iron and Gold

I have been reading two completely different books, yet each has stirred me in the same way. One, the above title, is about how the railways transformed the world; the other, a novel called "Empire of silver", is of the rise of the Genghis Khan dynasty.


What has caught my attention is that each of these world movements involved single overpowering ideas executed in a way that had not been seen before.


For the Mongols it was all about conquest, and the way they did that was through an unstoppable new method of warfare. They didn't care who they faced, nor how strong they were; they were supremely confident in themselves and their ability to win. Interestingly, and this is another thought worth developing, they began to fall apart the more they assimilated themselves into the surrounding cultures. For some inexplicable reason, when Genghis' son, the new khan, died they pulled back from total domination of Europe - if they hadn't, modern world history would have turned out completely different. Eurasia just never had an answer to the blood conquest!


Unlike the Mongols, the conquest of the railways - the iron - did change the course of world history. It was all about a single idea: freight - the movement of people and produce over vast distances. No matter who ran them, public, private or government, they expanded across all continents and nations. The great engineers would go out into the world, in often hazardous and difficult terrain, to proclaim the "iron gospel"; nothing was allowed to stand in the way of the progress of the railroad vision!


What does that mean for us; what do we learn from these world-changing events? Are there any lessons for the Church? I think so. Firstly, it must be noted that Christianity is not interested in conquest for its own end, but, to stretch the analogy, we have a conquest of gold - something so precious that it is worth sharing until the world changes. It is our single overpowering idea: the Gospel.


Like the Mongols, we have to find new methods, methods that the world has no answer for, without being assimilated into the surrounding culture. Like the railroad, we must let nothing become insurmountable; in God, we will always find a way! The Gospel is world-changing; let it be so!