Definition. Home church is the Unification Church pastoral practice — promoted by Sun Myung Moon especially from the late 1970s onward — in which members establish a small church-like community of relationships within a specific neighborhood (the “mission field”) and then within their own home town, centering on family and relatives, as the primary vehicle of evangelism and lineage restoration.
Expanded. Home church is distinct from:
- Street witnessing — the 1970s mode that Sun Myung Moon explicitly redirected away from (see smm-1980s-teaching-street-witnessing-doesnt-grow-church).
- Conventional Christian small groups — home church is theologically loaded: completing it qualifies a member as “truly elevated as messiah” in their sphere (see home-church-completion-equals-messianic-elevation), which is more than a fellowship structure.
The canonical source is Home Church: The Words of Rev. Sun Myung Moon (HSA-UWC, 1983), pages 12, 185, 411-412. Key passages from that text frame home church as:
- Two-stage: first in the mission field where members are sent, then in the home town centering on relatives and family.
- Sufficient unto messianic elevation: completing both stages graduates a member from MFT (street fundraising) and conventional witnessing.
- Quality-focused, not quantity-focused: “We want to witness to the best people. We don’t want 1,000 people who can follow a leader; we want one leader who can lead 1,000 people.”
Home church operationalizes the distributed-messiahship element of UC’s believers’ responsibility doctrine: ordinary members exercise quasi-messianic authority within their own home-church sphere, downstream of the singular True Parents couple.
Referenced by
- home-church-completion-equals-messianic-elevation (atomic)
- smm-1980s-teaching-street-witnessing-doesnt-grow-church (atomic)
- smm-real-church-is-one-person-not-a-building (atomic)
- uc-as-network-of-hubs-without-parish-lines (atomic)
- believers-responsibility (glossary)
- blessing (glossary)
- true-parents (glossary)
- populist-church (glossary)
- sunday-service-as-harvest (glossary)