Koreans have a saying that a person insulted by others lives
of insults I’ve received, I could live another hundred years.
Also, my stomach has been filled not with food but with insults,
so you could say that my stomach is the most full of anyone’s. Established
churches that had opposed me and thrown stones at me
when I started a church in Pyongyang resumed their persecution,
this time in Busan. Even before we had properly begun our church,
they set out to give us trouble. Words like heretic and pseudo- were
placed in front of my name so often that they seemed to become
part of my name. Indeed, the phrase Sun Myung Moon came to be
synonymous with heresy and pseudo-religion. It’s hard to even hear
my name mentioned without these words.
By 1953, the persecution reached extremes. We closed the hut
in Busan and moved first to Daegu and then to Seoul. In May of
the following year, we rented a house in Seoul’s Bukhak Dong
neighborhood, located near Jang-choong-dang Park, and hung
out a sign that read “Holy Spirit Association for the Unification
of World Christianity.” We chose this name to signify that we
belonged to no denomination, and we certainly had no plans to
create a new one.
“World Christianity” refers to all of Christianity worldwide and
both past and present. “Unification” reveals our purpose of oneness,
and “Holy Spirit” is used to denote harmony between the spiritual and
physical worlds built on the love of the father-son relationship at the
center. Our name is meant to say, “The spiritual world, centering on
God, is with us.”
In particular, unification represents my purpose to bring about God’s
ideal world. Unification is not union. Union is when two things come together.
Unification is when two become one. “Unification Church” became
our commonly known name later, but it was given to us by others. In the
beginning, university students referred to us as “the Seoul Church.”
I do not like using the word kyo-hoi in its common usage to mean
church. But I like its meaning from the original Chinese characters. Kyo
means “to teach,” and Hoi means “gathering.” The Korean word means, literally,
“gathering for teaching.” The word for religion, jong-kyo, is composed
of two Chinese characters meaning “central” and “teaching,” respectively.
When the word church means a gathering where spiritual fundamentals
are taught, it has a good meaning. But the meaning of the word kyo-hoi
does not provide any reason for people to share with each other. People in
general do not use the word kyo-hoi with that meaning. I did not want to
place ourselves in this separatist type of category. My hope was for the rise
of a church without a denomination. True religion tries to save the nation,
even if it must sacrifice its own religious body to do so; it tries to save the
world, even at the cost of sacrificing its nation; and it tries to save humanity,
even if this means sacrificing the world. By this understanding, there can
never be a time when the denomination takes precedence.
It was necessary to hang out a church sign, but in my heart I was
ready to take it down at any time. As soon as a person hangs a sign
that says “church,” he is making a distinction between church and not
church. Taking something that is one and dividing it into two is not
right. This was not my dream. It is not the path I chose to travel. If I
need to take down that sign to save the nation or the world, I am ready
to do so at any time.
Our sign hung near the front entrance. It would have looked better
if we had hung it someplace high, but the eaves on the house came
down very low, giving us no good spot to place a sign. In the end, we
hung it about as high as the height of a child. In fact, some children in
the neighborhood took down our sign, played with it, and broke it in
two. Because of its historical significance, we could not throw it away.
We attached the two pieces back together with wire and nailed it more
securely to the front. Perhaps because our sign was treated with such
humiliation, our church also received humiliation beyond description.
The eaves were so low that people had to duck their heads in order
to pass through the entrance. The room was about eight feet square,
and it was so cramped that when six of us would pray we might bump
foreheads with each other. People in the neighborhood laughed at our
sign. They made fun of us, asking what kind of world unification we
dreamt of in that tiny little house that “you have to crawl to get into.”
They didn’t try to find out why we had chosen such a name. They simply
looked at us as if we were crazy.
This did not bother us, however. In Busan, we had begged for food to
sustain ourselves, and now we had a room to perform services. We had
nothing to fear. For a suit, I took a pair of U.S. Army fatigues and dyed
them black. I wore these with black rubber shoes. Even if others sought
to belittle us, in our hearts we were more dignified than anyone.
People who attended called one another shik-ku, or family member. We
were intoxicated with love. Anyone who came there could see what I was
doing and hear what I was saying. We were connected by an inner cord
of love that let us communicate with God. A woman would be at home
preparing rice and suddenly run off to the church. Someone else would say
she was going to change into a new dress and then run off to the church in
her old dress with holes in it. If a woman’s in-laws shaved her hair to keep her
from going to the church, she would come with her bald head.
As our members increased, we began to evangelize on university
campuses. In the 1950s, university students were premier among intellectuals
in Korean society. We began by working near the gates of Ewha
Womans University and Yonsei University. Soon a sizable number of
students were spending time at our church.
Professor Yoon Young Yang, who taught music at Ewha, and Professor
Choong Hwa Han, who was the dormitory master, came to our
church. Many students also came, but they did not come just one or two
at a time. Dozens came, and their numbers grew in geometric progression.
This surprised the established churches and us as well.
Within two months after we began our campus evangelical work, our
congregation exploded in size, primarily with students from Ewha and
Yonsei. The rate of growth was incredible. It was as if a spring breeze
had blown through and changed the hearts of the students all in a moment.
Dozens of Ewha students packed up their belongings and moved
out of the dormitory. This happened on a single day. If someone tried
to stop them, they would say, “Why? Why are you trying to stop me? If
you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. Kill me!” They even came
out by climbing the walls around the building. I tried to stop them, but
it was no use. They did not want to be in their clean school; they wanted
to be in our little church that smelled of dirty feet. There was nothing
anyone could do about it.
Finally Dean Hwal Ran Kim (Helen Kim) sent Professor Young
Oon Kim of the Department of Religious Social Welfare to our church.
Professor Kim had studied theology in Canada and was a theologian
in whom Ewha held out great hope for the future. Dean Kim chose
Professor Kim because her specialty was theology, and she assumed she
could develop a definitive critique of our theology that could be used
to finally stop this influx of students. But a week after meeting me, this
special representative, Professor Kim, joined our church and became
one of our most enthusiastic members. This gave us even more credibility
among the other professors and students at Ewha. Our membership
numbers snowballed.
The situation grew out of control, and established churches resumed
their accusations that we were stealing their members. This seemed
unfair to me. I never told anyone to listen to my sermons or attend
our church. If I chased people out the front door, they would come
in the back. If I locked the doors, they would climb over the fence. I
was powerless to stop them. The people most perplexed by this were
the administrators of Yonsei and Ewha, who in turn were supported by
Christian foundations. They could not stand by and do nothing as their
students and faculty came swarming to some other religious group.
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