Bringing the Divine Principle to the West

This week in history, January 3-9:

• Dr. Young Oon Kim begins American mission (January 4, 1959)
• True Father plans his inaugural speaking tour (January 4, 1972)
• The Internal Revenue Service begins audit of Unification Church (January 6, 1976)
• True Father begins Cosmic Assemblies for the Settlement of the True Parents (January 8, 2012)
• Kazakhstan imprisons a Unificationist missionary (Jan 9, 2009)

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 4, 1972

True Father Plans His Inaugural Speaking Tour

On January 4, 1972, at a joint meeting of East and West Coast Korean missionaries to the United States in Washington, D.C., True Father implemented plans to launch his first-ever speaking tour. The “Day of Hope” speaking tour became the major focus of True Parents’ third world tour. During True Father’s first world tour in 1965, he blessed Holy Grounds in 40 countries. During True Parents’ second world tour, they blessed 43 couples worldwide. During their third world tour in 1972, True Father began a new phase in his public ministry, as he had not spoken publicly in either Korea or Japan. The first Day of Hope tour began on February 3, 1972, at Alice Tully Hall, a concert hall that is part of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and included stops in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Berkeley, California.

January 6, 1976

Internal Revenue Service Begins Audit of Unification Church

On January 6, 1976, Senator Bob Dole (R-Kansas) wrote a letter to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner stating that an audit of the Unification Church was needed.

Within days, the IRS began what Carleton Sherwood, in his book Inquisition, The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (Regnery Gateway, 1991), termed “the most intensive and expensive criminal tax investigation of any religious figure in U.S. history.” A squad of IRS agents took up permanent offices in the Unification Church’s downtown New York headquarters, while a team of field agents began round-the-clock surveillance of selected church members and their telephones. In 1978, after two years of investigations, the IRS was unable to find anything that compromised the church’s tax exempt status but turned over to the New York District Attorney’s Office “certain anomalies” in Rev. Moon’s tax returns for the years 1973-75. This eventually led to the indictment of True Father.

January 8, 2012

True Father Begins Cosmic Assemblies for the Settlement of the True Parents

From January 8 to 15, 2012, True Father conducted rallies in eight Korean cities in which he proclaimed the conclusion and fulfillment of the providence of restoration during True Parents’ lifetime. He stated, “The path taken by the True Parents shall serve as a tradition and historic example” and asked that all “model your life course on this path, become families that pledge to inherit and fulfill the will of God that True Parents have already accomplished, and be true to this pledge.” His speech included the topics the Three Stages of Life, the Seonghwa Ascension Ceremony, One Family under God, the Mission of the Korean People, the Path Humankind Should Take, his Final Words for Humankind, the Proclamation of the Era of the Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind, and the Advent of the Era of the New Substantial Image.

Jan 9, 2009

Kazakhstan Imprisons Unificationist Missionary

Elizaveta Drenicheva (28) was jailed in Almaty, the second capitol of Kazakhstan on January 9, 2009. She was sentenced to no less than two years behind bars in a District prison. Drenicheva, a Russian citizen, joined the Unification Church in 1995 and started her missionary work in Kazakhstan in 2006. On July 2nd, 2008 at 6 am KGB officers broke into the building of the Unification Peace Embassy to conduct a random search. They took away literature and computers. Drenicheva was arrested. Other members where asked not to leave the country. After two days Elizaveta was released and made to sign a written pledge not to leave the country. On October 24 legal proceedings got under. She was accused under article 164 part 2 of the Criminal Code for “having violated the peace and security of humanity”!” Her offense was that she gathered four people for a seminar and over a course of four days she taught to her audience the Unification Principles. An agent of the KGB under authorization of the office of prosecutor, infiltrated the seminar. He reported, “The materials presented “contain a) propaganda demeaning persons for signs of their ethnic affinity; and b) propaganda demeaning persons for signs of their class affinity. Moreover it shows signs of harmful effects on individual, family, society, and likewise the moral integrity of the state.” Kazakhstan was heavily rebuked by various human rights defenders and NGOs for restrictive measures on religious communities. As a consequence of international pressure, Drenicheva was freed March 10, 2009.