The Words of the Chang Family
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The Words of the Chang Family |
The following is a short biography of Elder Chang’s time in Korea from the viewpoint of his second son, Rev. Choong Keun Chang, National Messiah to D.R. Congo. Rev. Chang’s family took care of Elder Chang.
Born 1914, November 27th in Pyongyang North Korea. Among 5 siblings he was the second born, first son.
Married in 1938 to Chun, Yong Bok. He was a Christian at that time.
He had 6 children, 3 sons and 3 daughters.
On 1950 June 25th, he fled to South Korea during the civil war.
In 1953 he established Chung Mu Church in Seoul which was a Presbyterian Church.
In 1954 he left that Church and in 1955 he joined the Unification Church.
In 1963 he was Blessed with the 24 pre-married couples.
In 1975 he emigrated to Toronto, Canada.
He passed away 2008, October 3rd at 12:15pm.
I was born in 1941 on November 15, Lunar Calendar. I am the second son of six children. I was born during a time of war; Japan was allied with Germany, working together to conquer South East Asia. My Father, Songdo Chang, was a Presbyterian elder at the time. My mother, Youngbok Jun married my father on the condition that he convert and believe in Jesus Christ. My Mother comes from a line of devote Presbyterians. During the Japanese Colonial time my Presbyterian great grandfather on my mothers side, was arrested, tortured, and killed during the Independence movement for participating in the March 1st Mansie movement. My mother was only seven years old.
My father is a great spiritual force in my life. He is very spiritually open. He has conversed many times with God and the saints of history. During the war, my father said that God guided him explicitly during his service in the army and created many avenues for him to take that kept him from ever taking another man’s life. God sent angels who spoke to my father and helped him avert death many times on the battlefield and off. I believe God kept my Father alive for some great plan. My father is also the second son of six children. I have six children, all of which are girls except for one boy; our destinies are inexorably connected and will continue from my father, down to me, down to my son, and to my son’s sons.
My father visits the holy ground in Toronto everyday at four am to pray for Rev. Moon’s mission and our family. He reads forty pages of Divine Principle everyday to set a condition to keep his relationship with God open. I have listened to him and sought his spiritual guidance since an early age and have continued to do so in my old age. He has guided me spiritually throughout my ministry.
My parents are originally from Pyongyang, North Korea. I was nine years old in1950 and on July 25th of that year, civil war occurred and we had no other choice but to escape to South Korea the next year. The north had become communist and we could not live there. At that time, six of my family members fled to the south and became refugees. The angels guided my father, telling him to travel only by night and to stay only in places that were vacant. It was easier to travel at night. When the angels told him to hide, he would hide where they told him too. The empty places always had food in them because people had left so quickly so we never starved. When we reached South Korea we stayed with our uncle in his home in Myungdong Seoul. When the war was over, the 38th parallel was established.
While living in Myungdong, my Father established the Choong-mo-ro church, a Christian based church, and worked as the church elder. However, he grew skeptical towards the church when he saw the administrative people fight with the minister and for a while, he stopped attending church. It was when our family moved to Pil-dong that we had our first contact with the Unification Church.
My father was working in a supermarket when a delivery man who was bringing towels witnessed to him. He began to ignore household affairs and continuously attended the church in rapture. Eventually my mother started to follow him and they ended up going together. In 1956, when I was in middle school, my younger siblings and I started to attend the Unification church and my older brother followed after a couple of months.
At that time my mother was attending the Calvin Theological School. I helped my mother do her homework so I learned many things about theology at that time. I also attended the mission school. As an adolescent, while I was still living in North Korea, the Western missionaries that came to Pyongyang wanted to teach me, however, due to the opposition of my grandmother on my mother’s side, my religious studies began instead at this time while I was in mission school.
I continued to attend the mission school in junior and learned a lot about the bible from our reverend. What I learned at the church where my father went was so different from the things that I learned at school. At first, I just followed my parents to the Unification Church services without any sense or understanding of what was being taught but as the time went on, I started to attend the early morning services, and every weekend, through the words that I heard, I began to realize and believe that the one they called ‘Teacher’ was the Messiah. After that, I came to understand the whole content of each sermon and started to receive all the words in a positive light. The ministers and teachers at school would tell me not to fall for heretical doctrine. Their discouragement caused me to go even more. As the days went by, I attended the early morning service, Wednesday evening meeting and did not miss a single student service. These were the foundations of my religious and spiritual growth.
I am the granddaughter of Mr. Song Do Chang, who just recently passed away. He leaves behind two sons and a daughter and a growing lineage reaching to the third generation. He was born in 1914 November 27th and seunghwa’d at the age of 93.
Not many people knew him personally or even as a member but I wanted to share this small tribute to him with all of our UC members because I believe that it is important to remember the pioneering members and to listen to their stories so that we can remember them in our lives of faith and let their lives inspire us to keep moving forward.
I was the closest grandchild mainly because I could communicate with him in Korean. We used to talk for hours on the phone and also in person. If I could sum up or describe him in a sentence I would have to say that he lived and breathed a life centered on True Parents and God’s will.
I want to share some stories about him that has left a strong impression in my mind.
He first met True Father, back in the early 1950’s. My grandfather was spiritually open and could converse with the spirit world. During the civil war he was guided to Seoul from North Korea by the spirit world. During the night he was told to travel and during the day he was guided to sleep in safe areas. As he and his family settled in what we know today as Choong-Moroh city inside Seoul, he became one of five presbyter elders.
He was always very religious, with a strong Christian background. He told me many stories about how his faith in Jesus saved him from the communists. He had some problems with the church he was affiliated with so he stopped attending for about a year and a half. One day a man by the name of Jang Woo No came to the store he worked at. He was a member of the church and a delivery man. This man witnessed to my grandfather and soon he was invited to the weekly services they had on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Back in the 1950’s the movement was known as a heretical cult, therefore it was difficult to gather and meet in public so the meeting places for the service kept changing without ample notice. At that time the many women were expelled from Ewha University and strange rumors were circulating everywhere, but still my grandfather attended the services because he liked Teacher’s ( this is what the early members called True Father before he was blessed to True Mother) lectures about the Divine Principle.
One day, ‘Teacher’ approached my grandfather and spoke to him. He asked him to work for one of the church organizations as an electrician (he was a very skilled electrician, shoe maker, leader etc… during the Japanese occupation) however, Teacher asked him using the lower form of Korean. True Father called my grandfather, “Chang ‘yong kam’ (which roughly means ‘old man’) instead of Chang Jang-roh, which means Presbyter Chang in an honorific way. My Grandfather was almost six years older than Him so this agitated him greatly and he wondered how this minister could be so rude! My grandfather turned down True Father’s request to have him work for the factory six times. Then my grandfather asked True Father, how much he would pay him if he worked in the factory. Father replied by saying he would give him a certain amount of rice, however, my grandfather felt that it wasn’t a sufficient amount to feed his family of eight, so he turned True Father down another three times.
My grandfather couldn’t get how Teacher could call him Chang yong-gam and as it bothered him so much, he decided to pray to God and ask him, just who this man was exactly. As he prayed God showed him a vision of the world. My grandfather was floating out in the universe and he saw the world before him. Then standing on his left he saw Jesus and standing to his right was True Father (The Teacher).
My grandfather looked at him and saw that he was dressed in a bright beautiful Korean Nobleman’s clothing and also a nobleman’s Korean black hat. Then from behind my grandfather he heard God’s voice saying, “This is the one who has returned, attend him well.” After having this experience my grandfather quickly realized who his Teacher was and regretted having turned him down so many times. He decided that on that following gathering he would tell his Teacher what he experienced and that he would work in his factory.
When my grandfather went to the church and saw True Father, he didn’t even open his mouth and the first thing True Father said to him was, “ Did you see something last night?” as if True Father already knew that he had had such an experience. My grandfather told True Father that he was the one who had returned. True Father was very happy to hear this and he told him to testify to the rest of the members about what he experienced.
My grandfather became an official member in 1955 and was blessed as a pre-married couple in 1963 February 8th.
I want to share two special instances where the revelations my grandfather received were received my True Parents. There were a few times when True Father would look for my father to ask him what kind of revelations my grandfather had received from Heaven.
I believe that it was in the year 2000-2001 when True Mother was giving her speech tour. True Father was in South America fishing with leaders. My father also participated in that workshop. Prior to meeting True Father, my grandfather told my father before he left for the workshop that if True Father were to ask him if he had anything to say then to tell him the message he was about to tell him.
When my father heard that True Father was looking for him twice, my father finally was able to find father fishing in his boat.
He asked my father to enter his boat and he immediately asked my father, “What did your father say?” My father said, “That from now on, if you want to say something then you have to tell the people exactly what you want to say.” With that, TF changed his schedule. TM was going on the tour alone, but instead TF asked Mr. Peter Kim to change the schedule so that he could do the tour together with her.
Another incident took place in 1995 December 7 True Parents arrived in Toronto, Canada as they were on a world speaking tour. Before they came to Canada, they were turned away from the French and English immigration. We had received reports that True Parents were very saddened by this and that the immigration had contacted the Canadian immigration to make sure that True Parents could not pass through into Canada. When my father told my Grandfather this, he started a 5 day prayer condition so that the Canadian immigration would become blind to the fact of True Parents were coming.
True Parents arrived in Canada escorted by their lawyer Mr. Bruce Casino. As they were going through immigration he took both True Parents passports along with his and handed them to the immigration officer. The officer asked Mr. Casino, “Who are those people standing behind you? He responded, “They are my True Parents.” According to the testimony that was given later, they felt that the immigration officers must have believed that they were Bruce Casino’s adopted parents since they didn’t look ethnically the same, so she stamped all three passports without looking at the names on the passports. True Parents went swiftly out the front gates of the airport and went quickly away.
The other people that came with True Parents were caught in immigration, however, one in particular, President Dong Moon Joo, had in his passport the Korean style printing of names, Joo (last name first) Dong Moon. It made it seem as though he was the ‘Moon.’ President Joo later said that he didn’t mind being mistaken as Father for those three hours. Eventually all parties were let through. When the event was over, True Father blessed my parents by telling them that they received all the blessings of that event.
My grandfather was a very orderly man. He planned out his day and followed it, though he was open to spontaneous situations. He had a very special schedule that started at around 3:30 am. He would wake up every morning at around 3:30 am and prepare to go to the holy ground which was located close to his apartment. He made a condition to pray for the glory and victory of True Parents mission on earth and for God’s will to be realized. He would go there rain or shine. My parents decided to attend one of these prayer sessions, thinking they would be back home in no time. The session lasted for two hours. My grandfather would prayer twenty minutes at eight different points around the tree, saying he had to face all the corners of the universe. My parents were so exhausted that day but my grandfather was fine. He had conditioned himself to fulfill this condition everyday.
For at least 15 years until his accident, he went every single morning. He once told me that when it snowed, the snow came up to his waist but he pushed away the snow to get to the holy ground. I yelled at him, “Why did you go there when the weather was so bad, what if you got hurt? What if something happened to you?” He would insist that he would be alright. He also said that some patrol cops were around and they stopped to ask if he was alright, but my grandfather waved them on and continued on to the holy ground. In this way, at that age, he prayed.
He also read 40 pages of the Divine Principle, every morning, and would make a mark on the back of the book and later on a sheet of paper to show how many times he read it. I believe he read the Divine Principle over 500 times. He told me that this was like a condition which allowed him to converse with God and also for God to reveal revelations of True Parents to him. He received proclamations from Heaven that True Father would announce sometimes up to three years later.
What I am always reminded of my grandfather is that he really loved God and True Parents. He lived and breathed speaking words of love and whenever he had the chance spoke about the greatness of True Parents and all they accomplished for God and the world. He was also a romantic. If I told him that I was thinking about so and so about the Blessing, he would create a whole romantic love story of how the two of us could create an ideal family and express love to one another. I could talk to him like he was my best friend.
In 1991 when True Parents went to Toronto, Canada, True Father called on my Grandfather and described him as “Napoleon.” True Father was at the recent workshop in Hawaii when he heard of my grandfather’s passing. He spoke of my grandfather with my father during the Hawaii workshop and said, “ What was his name again?” and my father gave my grandfather’s name, Chang, Song do, but True Father said, “No, no it was Napoleon. He was the man that brought victory to the French Revolution.” Our family is still not completely clear on why True Father compared him to Napoleon, but I believe that it will become clearer as his lineage grows and perhaps creates a revolution for God and humanity. As his granddaughter, I want to pledge that I will become the fruit of his seed of love and faith for God and True Parents.