Proclaiming a New Age

This week in history, January 4-10:

• Miss Kim begins the American mission
• True Father proclaims the Completed Testament Age

January 4, 1959

Miss Kim Begins the American Mission

Dr. Young Oon Kim (right) with early missionaries.

Dr. Young Oon Kim was the first Unification Church missionary to America. A former professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Miss Kim had done postgraduate work at the University of Toronto and attended international Christian conferences in Germany and Switzerland. She later wrote: “As soon as I discovered the universal value of the Divine Principles and the heavenly dispensation, I began to be concerned with the people of the Western world with whom I had established a cultural bond. Not only did I feel this, but in the rest of the membership there was no one else at that time who could undertake the job of bringing the Principle to the West.”

Miss Kim arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where she had been accepted as a student, in the midst of a raging snowstorm on January 4, 1959. She immediately began witnessing and took up residence in Oakhill, a rural settlement, with several of her most promising contacts. There she worked on an English translation of the Principle, raised members and established patterns of community life until late 1960, when she migrated, along with five Oakhill members, several hundred miles down the coast to San Francisco. In the Bay Area she completed her English translation of the Principle, incorporated the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC), and expanded her group, then known as the Unified Family. In 1965, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she directed a fluctuating network of centers throughout the United States and Western Europe until 1972.

January 10, 1993

True Father Proclaims the Completed Testament Age

After proclaiming the Completed Testament Age on January 10, True Parents toured the nation and spoke on this theme.

On August 24, 1992, at the first World Culture and Sports Festival (WCSF) and on the foundation of the Cold War’s end, True Father declared that he and True Mother “are the True Parents of all humanity … the Savior, the Lord of the Second Advent, the Messiah.” It was hard to imagine how True Father could proclaim anything more dramatic than that. However, he may have succeeded in doing so by proclaiming the beginning of a whole new historical epoch. In a speech, “The Reappearance of the Second Coming and the Completed Testament Era,” delivered at Belvedere International Training Center, Tarrytown, New York, on January 10, 1993, True Father announced “the transition today to the Completed Testament Era.” Details as to the precise nature of the new epoch were as yet sketchy, but it was understood to involve a fundamental shift in the order of salvation. As one church leader explained, “Previously, religious organizations have always been centered upon the salvation of the individual, but we have now progressed to the salvation of the family.”

The implications of this were momentous. Essentially it signaled a radical new beginning for Unificationism and rendered all previous religious expressions, including that of the Unification Church, obsolete. Within a few years, the church began to reconfigure itself as a “Family Federation,” developed theological concepts and terminology reflective of the shift, and launched efforts to realize a restored and purified Garden of Eden. The gateway to the Completed Testament Age (CTA) was the Blessing, which extended far beyond the Unificationist community during the 1990s. The immediate concern was to proclaim the message of the new age. On April 10, 1993, the statement “True Parents and the Completed Testament Age” was published in the newspapers of 160 nations. Then, in May 1993, True Parents began a tour of thirty-three U.S. cities under the same theme. True Mother spoke on Capitol Hill and in the United Nations, which served as a springboard to proclaiming the CTA message worldwide.

This Week in History briefly lists significant events in the history of the Unification Church, the lives of the Founders, and world events that are momentous to Unificationists. Most items are marked according to the solar calendar. Items marked “H.C.” correspond to the Cheon-gi or Heavenly Calendar, which is based on the lunar calendar. This installment covers the week of January 4–10.