Sun Myung Moon
March 1, 2009
As a Peace-loving Global Citizen, Pages 121-123
Photo date and location unknown
By 1953, the persecution reached extremes. We closed the hut in Pusan and moved first to Daegu and then to Seoul. In May of the following year, we rented a house in Seoul's Bukhak-Dong neighborhood, located near Jang-choong-dan Park, and hung out a sign that read "Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity."
We chose this name to signify that we belonged to no denomination, and we certainly had no plans to create a new one. World Christianity refers to all of Christianity worldwide and both past and present. Unification reveals our purpose of oneness and Holy Spirit is used to denote harmony between the spiritual and physical worlds built on the love the father-son relationship at the center. Our name is meant to say, "The spiritual world, centered on God, is with us."
In particular, unification represents my purpose to bring about God's ideal world. Unification is not union. Union is when two things come together. Unification is when two become one. "Unification Church" became our commonly known name, later, but it was given to us by others. In the beginning, university students referred to us as "the Seoul Church."
I do not like using the word kyo-hoi in its common usage to mean church. But I like its meaning from the original Chinese characters. Kyo means "to teach," and Hoi means, "gathering." The Korean word means, literally, "gathering for teaching." The word for religion, jong-kyo, is composed of two Chinese characters meaning "central" and "teaching", respectively. When the word church means a gathering where spiritual fundamentals are taught, it has a good meaning. But the meaning of the word kyo-hoi does not provide any reason for people to share with each other.
People in general do not use the word kyo-hoi with that meaning. I do not want to place ourselves in this separatist type of category. My hope was for the rise of a church without a denomination. True religion tries to save the nation, even it must sacrifice its own religious body to do so; it tries to save the world even at the cost of sacrificing its own nation; and it tries to save humanity; even if this means sacrificing the world. By this understanding, there can never be a time when the denomination takes precedence.
It was necessary to hang out a church sign, but in my heart I was ready to take it down at any time. As soon as a person hangs a sign that says, "church," he is making a distinction between church and not church. Taking something that is one and dividing it into two is not right. This was not my dream. It is not the path I chose to travel. If I need to take down that sign to save the nation or the world, I am ready to do so at any time.