Claim. Reverend Moon explicitly told UC members in the 1980s that street witnessing does not grow the church — and called instead for selective focus on capable leaders (“one leader who can lead 1,000 people” rather than “1,000 people who can follow a leader”), correcting the common UC self-image of street-evangelism as the path to growth.
Elaboration. Hendricks cites Moon directly from Home Church (1983), pp. 12, 412 ff, 411 (value-4-people-need-cultural-relevance):
“If you witness to someone on the street, it has only the significance of that individual. …it is a one-to-one relationship that does not go beyond that level. Do not witness so much in the street because you don’t know anything about the people you meet. …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. …even when we work hard the fruit of our witnessing is often dispersed and leaves little benefit in the center.”
This is a revisionist atomic — it contradicts the popular UC self-narrative (especially among 1970s converts) that street evangelism was Father’s directive. Per Hendricks, the 1980s teaching was a course correction away from street witnessing toward home church in established relationships — connecting to the broader strategy shift documented in home-church-completion-equals-messianic-elevation.
For wrestling: the post-mortems on UC’s American membership decline often invoke “we should have witnessed more on the streets like the 70s.” This atomic recordings Moon’s own contemporaneous correction of that view.
See also. home-church, sun-myung-moon, home-church-completion-equals-messianic-elevation, populist-church