In this book I will address most of my questions to organizational structure and strategy. But the prior matter, the first piece of the puzzle, is the purpose of the organizational structure and strategy, which is the personal encounter with God. And that starts with God.
The Unificationist Message
To succeed, religions need a simple and distinctive message through which people experience God’s spirit. When it comes to religion in a free society, people vote with their feet. But the church cannot control that or force that. It is God alone who finally moves hearts and feet. That foot-moving, heart-moving message is about God; it is God’s Word. God speaks out of who He is, and it is my confession that who He is, is revealed in True Parents. In True Parents, God has revealed who He is and the motive of creation — the marriage of husband and wife, the making of two persons into one. So God reveals Himself through persons and personal relations. Everything boils down to personhood.
God is a person and we are persons. Personhood is the absolute value and love for persons, God and one’s neighbor, is the highest end for any action. The purpose of creation lies in the love relationship between persons, which results in the highest experience of joy. And God is a person. Therefore the core mission of religion is to facilitate a personal relationship between each of us and God and with each other. By those relationships, I become a full person.
This is why the most powerful religious movements have arisen in the name of a person and the core message of each faith congeals around a person or persons. The Divine Principle calls such persons central figures: Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, Lao Tse, Zoroaster, Guru Nanak… these persons bring God into the world.
Historically the most powerful religious movements have arisen in the name of a singular personal representative of the Divine.
What were we Unificationists called back when we were an item? Not Unificationists, but Moonies. The public associates us with a person — Reverend Moon. Tell people you belong the Unification Church and they probably will say, huh? You’re a Unitarian? Then tell them, y’know, Reverend Moon. Oh, Reverend Moon! This is the way God works and the human brain works, because the cosmos is personal.
And each person, each religious founder, comes with a message. To identify themselves, the churches over the centuries created simple statements of belief, called creeds, and these centered on the personage of the founder. To become a member of the church, a person affirmed the creed (based on education), repented, received the sacrament or somehow entered into the ceremonial life of the religion, and was expected to live out their faith in community.
A creed provides the purpose for education and the lodestone for evangelism. Creeds are powerful statements, and good ones last for millennia. Consider the Jewish creed, in which the person is YHWH God:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, is the Lord one.”
God is one person, “I am who I am. Tell them ‘I am’ sent you,” God told Moses at the burning bush. God is one person, the one Lord above all.
The essential Christian creed, the Nicene Creed, is mainly about the person Jesus Christ:
“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, And sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints; The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen.”
The Islamic creed, the Shahadah, focuses on one person, the Prophet:
“I testify that there is no god but God (Allah), and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
We have the following text from the Korean church. It is the closest approximation of a Unificationist creed of which I am aware — a creed is different from a pledge — and it focuses on the True Parents:
“We hold the following to be true: The True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind are the first in all history and will eternally be the one and only Returning Lord, Peace King and King of Kings because they are the only ones to have fully revealed the nature of God’s divine essence. This essence is true love, a love that can bring even Satan to voluntary surrender. Our True Parents have enabled us to resemble God and approach His divine value as human beings.”1
This is about the personal True Parents and what they give to each of us. A more recent “Special Proclamation” reflects even more strongly the centrality of persons to religious faith:
God is the one King of Kings. There is only one set of True Parents. All families are the people who share a single lineage and are the children of one heavenly kingdom. Moreover, the command center of cosmic peace and unity is the absolute and unique command center. Its representative heir is Hyung Jin Moon.2
The True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind are the central figure of the Unification Church and they are two persons, Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han. Jesus personally called Sun Myung Moon who in turn called Hak Ja Han. Now he has called his youngest son, Reverend Hyung Jin Moon, to take his mantle. God is absolute, unchanging, unique and eternal and in Unification Church faith the same dignity is granted the True Parents. So too Jesus declared himself to be the way, the truth and the life and that no one could come to the Father but by him personally. This is the truth within the realm of God’s perfect love and governance.
Obviously no one in Jesus’ day accepted his absoluteness. It was not revealed by flesh and blood, but only by the Spirit. So too is the absoluteness of True Parents revealed, and by the Spirit, the True Parents have bequeathed their absoluteness to Hyung Jin Nim and Yeon Ah Nim. This is where God’s grace now flows into and through the veins of the church.
By the Spirit, the True Parents have bequeathed their absoluteness to Hyung Jin Nim and Yeon Ah Nim. This is where God’s grace now flows into and through the veins of the church. But what is the form, or forms, of the church?
But what is the form, or forms, of the church? The present essay has to do with this question, because it is essential to church growth.
Is This a Church?
Before going further, I want to discuss the extent to which a “church” is the proper vehicle for the messianic work of True Parents. It would seem to a casual observer, or a person unfamiliar with Christian theology, that Reverend Moon’s vision and mission for social transformation transcend the traditional category of church. But if we deepen our understanding of what the church is, we come to a different conclusion.
In terms of its identity, or being, the church is the body of Christ, which means in the body of True Parents. It also is the bride of Christ. The community of blessed couples stands both as the body and the bride of True Parents. Church, therefore, is the proper word to describe the communion of blessed couples on earth and in heaven. The body of Christ is based in the change of blood lineage, physical rebirth through the sacraments of the Blessing. Human beings are the center of the cosmos, so this is the rebirth of the world in totality, from the seed. This is indeed the body of Christ, the body of True Parents, and this is the theological meaning of the word, church.
In terms of its mission, or doing, the church is the assembly or gathering of people in which the Word is spoken and the sacraments given. For us, teaching and blessing does transcend the membership lists of the Unification Church, as the Word of True Parents is spoken and Blessing given to people who are not asked to be and do not consider themselves members of the Unification Church. I believe that such is not normative. In any case, the saving work — the giving of the Word and Blessing — is carried out by members of the church with the authority of the church.
For two thousand years, Christians have dealt with the “is – is not” nature of the church: it is the kingdom, it is not the kingdom. Obviously the church on earth is not free of sin and corruption, but it fights these infections through the medicine of the sacraments and faith and deeds of believers. The Blessing empowers us to form families engrafted to the seed of God. As the Christian church is a global family of spiritually reborn children, the Unification Church is the global family of physically reborn children. The Christian church is the conditional kingdom on earth, and the Unification Church is the same but with new conditions in place. The kingdom is the lineage of the True Parents expanded. Why is this identical with the institution of the Unification Church? Because that lineage is built on the Word and Blessing, and that is what the Unification Church is and all that the Unification Church is. When the Word and Blessing are fulfilled, the Unification Church will indeed no longer exist as an institution, for it will be coterminous with the human race on earth and in heaven.
I expect that each reader is going to fill in the blanks with regard to “the church,” but I ask you to resist that impulse. The purpose of this work is to discuss the growth of the Unification Church and, from that perspective, discuss its form. But before getting to that, we need to consider the identity of the church’s founder.
Reverend Moon’s Personal Calling
Let us consider Reverend Moon’s ministry from the perspective of his personal call. A leader’s authority originates with their call. Therefore, religions consider the source of their Founder’s call to be their source of authority and a serious matter. The Old Testament patriarchs and prophets enjoyed calls from God and from angels. Jesus referred to the Father as the source of his call. He told his questioners, “If you knew my Father, you would know who I am.” Muhammad and Joseph Smith referred to calls from angels (plus Elijah and Jesus’ disciples in Smith’s case). The visitation from Gabriel was Muhammad’s “night of power.” Mormon hagiography prominently features Smith on his knees with angels and holy men speaking to him.
Reverend Moon’s authority originates with Jesus Christ. And what was the content of the call? It was to pick up the entirety of Jesus’ cross, the entirety of his messianic mission, and take it to a successful conclusion. It was for this young man to serve God as only Jesus did, which tradition calls the Second Coming. Of the encounter, Reverend Moon wrote, “His sorrowful expression was etched into my heart as if it had been branded there, and I could not think of anything else. From that day on, I immersed myself completely in the Word of God. …I gradually became a boy of few words.”3
“His sorrowful expression was etched into my heart as if it had been branded there, and I could not think of anything else. From that day on, I immersed myself completely in the Word of God.” — Sun Myung Moon
Reverend Moon’s path and his teaching unfolded from that personal encounter and sustained personal relationship. This is not a work of theology, so I will but mention some implications of that event taken at face value. For example, the Second Coming is not in the clouds but on earth. In addition, there is more to the messianic mission remaining to be accomplished. If it is more, then it is beyond the cross. If it is on earth, then it is by a physical man. Whether that man is born sinless or perfected by his suffering (Heb. 5:7-9), he will be someone called and led by Jesus. The teenage boy was well aware that he was not Jesus, but a personification of Jesus’ mission.4
A physical Messiah will allow God to resume a fullness of presence in the world. What could possibly remain to be accomplished? The answer is simple: the salvation of marriage and family life, for Jesus never married or had a family. The idea that the Messiah will return to have children changes everything about how one reads the Bible. It brings marriage and lineage to the forefront. Passages such as Jesus statement that human beings have the devil as their father (John 8:44) loom larger. John’s differentiation of being “born of God” from being born of “natural descent, …of human decision or a husband’s will” looms larger. Jesus gave believers the right to become children of God (John 1:12) but explained that he was speaking of spiritual birth, not physical. (John 3:5-8) The physical return must be for God’s dominion over physical birth. These matters took the young Moon to the root of Christian faith, with Jesus — not Peter, not Paul, not Augustine, not an angel — guiding his prayer, study and path of life.
Its foundation in the work of Jesus Christ positions the Unification Church as Bible-based, with Reverend Moon under the personal mandate of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. “You will not see me again,” prophesied Jesus, “until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.‘” (Mt 23:39) Throughout the 70s in America, Reverend Moon included in his public speeches the exhortation to his Christian audience to ask Jesus directly whether his words were true. On a May morning this year, Reverend Moon, at age 90, stated, “I’m working to fulfill the wishes of Jesus; that’s why I’m doing my mission in the world.”5
The Unification Church Message
There is no way that “Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han are Messiah and True Parents” cannot be the Unificationist message. If it is true, how can it not be the message? For what reason could we put it way down on the list? True Father proclaims it, constantly. Everyone knows we believe it, or can find out with a few mouse clicks. Acceptance of this message is in fact the motivating faith of the members, the glue of our community. The Divine Principle theology teaches it. The church polity presupposes it.
Salvation in True Parents is not a matter of ethics. Christians have exemplary ethics, as do believers in all faiths. It is not even a matter of heart, in which people of all faiths excel. Of course Unificationists must be ethical and must have deep hearts of excellence and purity, but that is not what the church is here on earth for. It is here for salvation, for the Word made flesh in the man-woman relationship that gives rise to godly lineage. (Mal 2:15, 1 John 3:9)
By Jim Collins’s research, companies that move from “good to great” are those that have a relentless, laser-like focus on one simple “hedgehog concept” about which the company is passionate, is the best in the world at, and that can generate resources.6 True Parents are what Unificationists are passionate about (or should be, if we really believe he is the messiah), are best in the world at it (or should be, we’ve been following our whole lives), and can drive the resource engine with (the gold coins are in the mouths of the fish). This of course does not abrogate our responsibility to be wise, gentle and loving in our proclamation. Wisdom and care in ministering True Parents’ love to a suffering world is what this entire essay is about. I’m just saying that our good works must be grounded in a core message, that message must be person-centric, and that message is not peace, is not family values, is not science and religion, it is True Parents, Rev. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon.
Witnessing to the Message Brings the Holy Spirit
At the conclusion of a ceremony in November 2000, Dae Mo Nim, the senior leader of the Heaven and Earth Training Center at Cheong Pyeong Lake, who had liberated the heavenly spirit world to work on earth with us, said, “Okay, now you have to get actual results.” She said we could get actual results, engaging the spirits, by being sincere and honest and loving people despite their sin.7 Every time Reverend Moon declares that our ancestors are free to come and work with us, as he did once again on October 8, 2001, the proviso is that what is necessary finally to bring restored spirits to the earth is for members to carry out evangelism. What both were saying was that the Holy Spirit comes when we witness to God and True Parents.
The church began in 33 AD with an onrush of the Holy Spirit. Whether or not the number 3,000 recorded in Acts 2 is accurate, it is reasonable to conclude that a powerful event happened that transformed the Jerusalem mob that killed Jesus in April into a congregation of believers in June — and it wasn’t a revision of Roman imperial policy or a change of heart in the Sanhedrin. What triggered that onrush was the congregation of disciples taking ownership of the outrageous Gospel message of Jesus’ death and resurrection, proclaiming it openly, allowing the Spirit to come, and assimilating those affected through baptism and house-based community life. No Holy Spirit, no church. Acts 8:14-17 tells us that new Christians had received baptism in the name of Jesus but did not receive the Holy Spirit until the disciples laid hands on them. The Word, the sacrament and the human touch — this is the church.
Rev. Sun Myung Moon began his movement as a Holy Spirit Association. Unificationists once prayed extensively, shouting in unison, desperate, fervent and emotional. We voiced our faith with tears, created new music and roamed the countryside on missions for God. If we are wise, humble and fervent, we will again be able to provide the Holy Spirit a place to build the family of True Parents believers upon the earth. I note that part of the foundation for the Messiah is a social context conducive to his coming.8 What kind of social context is conducive to the Holy Spirit? It is a social context in which the people can get passionate and take ownership of a message just as outrageous as the one shouted out by Peter in Jerusalem.
The first half of our church’s name is the Holy Spirit Association. An association is a loose-knit assembly of like-minded people or communities, and that’s what Reverend Moon called his followers, an association guided by the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is real and if she is behind this man and his message, she will work again today in America, as she did many times in many places to build the Unification global family.
From Street to Society
As did many of us, I joined in the Oakland Unification center that grew from 3 people in 1971 to several hundred within the decade, in the process sending out thousands of missionaries. That was in California, but such growth was not limited to the West Coast. When I moved to Durham, New Hampshire, in 1973, our group numbering seven in May grew to 40 by that August. Twenty-one of the 40 were committed enough to move into the center. Dr. Martin Porter testifies that his traveling missionary team of 40 missionaries brought, in six-week crusades in 1974, hundreds of new members in every state they visited.
The Unification Church exploded with growth in the 1970s, when it was sending out young Americans, 21-25 years old, to pioneer churches or on international teams roaming the streets with a compelling message of personal salvation. There was a rigorous spiritual discipline with few rules. To join, youth adopted conservative fashions. The renunciation of secular habits both legal and illegal was evidenced by young men shorn of long hair and beards. We sustained a lifestyle of witnessing, teaching and fundraising. As a convert in California in 1973, I drove across the country to help establish a new center in New Hampshire. We had a big New England house and I was the seventh person to join the group. The “pastor,” Mike, was 21. At 24, I was the second oldest of the group. At four months in the church, I was the third most senior member.
Out of control? Yes, we were out of control, but it was for God. When I arrived, the group was on the sixth day of a seven-day fast. They were not ordered to do the fast; there was no sense that anyone was watching or expecting reports. We were saved, we had True Parents, and we wanted to save others. A week later, I brought in a 21-year old woman named Julie. A week after that, she picked up a hitchhiking college friend, Peter, who joined upon his arrival at the center. I encountered him as I came home late in the day, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a beatific smile, saying, “I don’t know what this is, but I want to be part of it.” He was on the street fundraising with us the following day. Two months later Julie, full of zeal, was appointed the church leader for the state of Mississippi.
This is how — and why — we grew in the early to mid-70s. It was in our hands. We were in touch with the dynamics that drive American youth to fast continually, pray all night, witness and teach all day, take endless cold water showers in repentance — guided by no human master, but by the spirit and truth. What we were was a populist church.
This Unificationist growth rate, accomplished with such a social context conducive to receiving the Messiah, equals or surpasses that of any church start-up you can name. Knowing this was only the first step, True Father wisely shifted strategy in the late 1970s from a youth movement to a family church. Instead of street and campus witnessing, they began to create home churches in neighborhoods. This was to begin in a mission field and be fulfilled back in the member’s own nation. “Once your [mission field] home church is completed,” Reverend Moon said, “…you will go to your home town and form your … home church centering on your relatives and family. Then you shall be truly elevated as messiah. Once you come to that point you will not have to do the difficult work of MFT [street fundraising] or witnessing because you will have graduated from all that.”9 This is to follow the pattern of most successful new churches, which begin on the streets and gradually develop settled church communities. We did not succeed in this at that time. That does not mean that we cannot succeed today, if we return to the populist approach.
God Predestined the Unification Church To Grow
The Divine Principle prophesies that popular acclaim for the Second Advent is inevitable if men and women fulfill their portion of responsibility. Although Jesus suffered on earth, his radical movement did actually succeed. Once the disciples were emboldened enough to speak out at the cost of their lives, they turned the Jerusalem mob that had called for Jesus’ crucifixion into a crowd that repented, was baptized in the name of Jesus, and received the Holy Spirit. At that point, the disciples had taken ownership of the message and people started experiencing God. The church, the bride of Christ, was born. God’s predestination is realized by human beings fulfilling their portion of responsibility, which means that we become members of good quality and develop large families spiritually and physically.
God Predestined Us to Bring Children to True Parents
God is a sociable Being, so to come before God, we are to bring others with us. Our original mind compels us to gather with others in relationships of love and heart. Individuals cannot go to heaven alone; heaven consists of a community of deep heart beginning with one’s family and physical and spiritual children. As we become such people of public-minded spirit, and come to value our True Parents and Divine Principle more deeply everyday, we naturally will introduce new people to the faith. It follows that sincere Unification Church members in community will create a “quantity” church. Church growth writer Aubrey Malphurs put it this way: “Quality churches with rare exceptions will become quantity churches because quality churches are actively involved in fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission, which involves reaching and discipling lost people. This results in numerical growth… Quality churches don’t stay small for very long.”10
Authentic Evangelism Supports Interreligious Peace-Building
I argue that church growth through a populist church model is the best way to achieve the Unificationist goal to impact nations and create a global culture of peace.
Reverend Moon’s Example
True Father is the source and model of our interfaith ethos, and he speaks to all people as he speaks to his church. He gives the Word and Blessing. At the founding of the Federation for World Peace, precursor to the Universal Peace Federation, in 1991, he made it clear that his interfaith organization had God at the center: his topic was God and salvation from sin. He concluded, “the very first item on our agenda” for world peace “shall be to invite God into our individual hearts, and those of our family, society, nation and world.”11 Since then, the presentation of the Unification sacraments, the Holy Wine and Blessing, along with sharing the Word of God have been a common feature of movement-related interfaith programs. This is what is in the vernacular called “doing church.”
Practical Purpose
As Rev. Hyung Jin Moon told the Universal Peace Federation gathering in Seoul, 2010, church members’ personal resources — not businesses or endowments — fund the movement’s para-church organizations. From this viewpoint, church growth does not undermine interreligious work; it pays for it, staffs it, coordinates it and, most importantly, is the spiritual foundation for a love that includes all races, nations and religions within the vision of one family under God.
The True Parents’ ideals of racial, national and religious peace cannot but be advanced by multitudes of people receiving the Messiah and joining the body in the world. I believe that it is natural that we provide the people who do so an effective path by which to join his church. As the vehicle for the proclamation of True Parents’ messianic work, which is the most important message for humankind to receive today, and to achieve racial, national and interreligious peace, growing the church is vital.
Historical Reality
Some argue that religion divides people and therefore evangelism contradicts the effort for peace represented by interfaith and ecumenism. I submit that in fact, Christian evangelism has been a greater contributor to world peace than have the world’s ecumenical and interfaith projects. The world’s first such project, the Parliament of the World Religions that took place in Chicago in 1893, was an evangelical Protestant project. The organizers made clear in their addresses to the gathered Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and others that their mission and mandate for the Parliament was from Jesus Christ. Here I am going to defend and stand upon the Divine Principle statements that Christianity is the one cultural sphere that will bring together all religions through love.
Despite the emphasis upon acting locally, America’s growing churches are not only self-sustaining and wealth-producing but they have a positive global impact. Consider the changed political environment in America in the last generation. The nation is shifting toward the values regnant in the growing churches, for marriage and family, accountability in the community, faith-based solutions, ecological consciousness and local ownership. Consider Willow Creek’s impact in Germany (as but one instance), where, as of 1997, 30,000 Christian leaders had participated in Willow Creek Association conferences.12 Willow Creek is influential with Christians of all nations, in particular Korea.
Look at the striking appearance of millions upon millions of American flags after 9/11, and the emergence of what was called our new national anthem, “God Bless America.”13 The “Religious Right” revived the Republican Party and swept Mr. Reagan into the White House. And, oh yes, we won the Cold War.
I am not under the impression that Christianity is flawless and uniformly beneficial. But I believe that it is the single greatest social force advancing education, human rights, the family, ecological advancement, democracy and the rule of law, health and sanitation, relief, and scientific and technological progress that there is on the planet.14
Let us look back at a quintessential expression of populist faith, Pentecostalism. This form of Christianity emerged in Los Angeles in 1905. It is now the fastest growing form of Christianity, especially throughout in the developing world. Pentecostal churches are sprouting throughout Asia, Africa, South America, China, Russia and even the Islamic world. Pentecostals today do not confine their attention to worship, but invest increasingly in education, ameliorating poverty, disaster relief, counseling for addiction, divorce and depression, care for abused women and children, medical services, economic development, the arts and public policy change.15 Pentecostalism is totally flat and focused on the experience of God.
Where on earth did it come from? Los Angeles. Back in 1905, Christians from the world over heard about goings-on in a house on Azusa Street, came to see for themselves, caught the Spirit, and took it back home to adapt it to their own setting. It was like the inexorable expansion of water, the softest material, which turns to ice and breaks boulders. These leaders’ emphasis is local activities, local heroes, local success. Who created the laptop computer? No one person created it; it was the result of thousands of creators, few of whom had any idea that what they were doing was going to be essential for the laptop. If the religions of the world are going to be unified through a single-source, it will be because that source empowers a new level of godly leadership and releases it to head off into the cracks and crevices of the world, where it will expand to break down the walls.
We need to complete these Christian achievements, and the achievements of all faith traditions, and bring humankind into one family under God. Reverend Hyung Jin Moon and Rev. In Jin Moon have clarified that the Unification Church is not a traditional Christian church, although it stands on the biblical and historical foundation of Judaism and Christianity. The Divine Principle prophesies that a new message is to emerge out of the Christian world. It will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that God will “restore the kingdom to Israel” and build “the house of prayer for all nations.” The land will be married (Is. 62:4) and the nation “will be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will bestow.” (Is. 62:2; 66:20) Hence the core ministry of True Parents is to create a new nation encompassing heaven and earth through the salvation of marriage and family.
Clear Differentiation
To abet the church fulfilling its mission, we must distinguish its nature and mission from that of economic, interfaith, community and service organizations. When the church is empowered to be the church, then our interfaith peace activities will also be empowered. The church’s authority is unique and when it is firm, para-church organizations will be able to define their mission distinctively from that of the church.
An ecumenical organization is not a church. Salvation is through the church and its Blessing. The church is the vehicle of the Blessing. The root of the church’s very existence, very purpose for being, is to give salvation through the Word and the Blessing, conveyed by hands and hearts of love. Surrounding that mission, the church will set clear, reasonable standards of morality and membership commitment necessary for people to receive the Blessing based on the Word, and carry out works of love. On the foundation of True Parents’ indemnity and declaration of the heavenly fortune the church over the past fifteen years bestowed the Blessing on uncounted millions of people without sincere education and family ministry in place. For failure to do so, we need to repent to God, True Parents and all of those people. Improved education and ministry will allow those millions, and millions more, beginning with ourselves, to realize the value of the Blessing and take complete responsibility for it. The best place to do that is the populist church.
In the final chapter, I will make a case that the populist approach to church life is a God-given vehicle for interreligious peacebuilding. But first we need to discuss the values that make for church growth and the nature of the populist approach and its applicability in the Unification context.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Unification Church Headquarters, Korea, March, 2010. ↩
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Sun Myung Moon, June, 2010. Passages relevant to this essay included. ↩
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Sun Myung Moon, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen (Washington, DC: The Washington Times Foundation, 2009), p. 53. ↩
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Reverend Moon, rejecting belief in reincarnation, understands this as analogous to Jesus’ identification of John the Baptist as Elijah, a different man with the same mission. Jesus recognized that two persons can share missions with such intensity that it is as if the first returned in the second. Hence he stated, John the Baptist is Elijah. No one else did so — although the chief priests queried about it. John denied it. ↩
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Rev. Moon’s informal talk to members, East Garden, Irvington, NY, March 30, 2010. ↩
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Collins, Jim, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap …and Others Don’t (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2001), passim. ↩
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From the author’s personal notes. ↩
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“the foundation for the Messiah also requires a social environment conducive to his coming.” Exposition of the Divine Principle, Foundation 3.3, p. 220. ↩
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Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Home Church: The Words of Rev. Sun Myung Moon (New York, NY: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1983), p. 185. ↩
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Aubrey Malphurs, Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide for New Churches and Those Desiring Renewal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998), pp. 27, 66. ↩
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Rev. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, True Family and World Peace (New York, NY: FFWPU, 2000), p. 176. ↩
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Richard Nyberg, “Willow Creek’s Methods Gain German Following,” Christianity Today, April 26, 1999. ↩
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I would add, by the way, that all religions in America find success through the methods described in this paper and that the “God Bless America” enthusiasm was multi-religious, while Christian at the core. ↩
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For example, research presented at the Council on Foreign Relations demonstrates that Protestantism, usually of the Pentecostal variety, is an avenue of economic advancement in Central America, whereas Catholicism is not. ↩
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See Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2007), pp. 42-43 and passim. ↩