Transcending Nationalities

Joe Kinney
June 2012

From left to right: David S.C. Kim, one of the first pioneers of the Unification Church in America; Joe Kinney and Robert Herring, prepare to leave Belvedere grounds for the Hope Tours, 1973.

Before I joined the church I was just a country bumpkin from Tennessee. I didn't know what sushi was and had never heard of kimchee, never seen the ocean and never been above the Mason-Dixon Line. Similarly, everyone who came together for the Day of Hope tours was provincial. We had lived in one country, spoken one language, eaten one kind of food and we had only worked with one type of people our whole lives. I spoke with such a southern drawl that nobody could understand me. It was especially difficult when I tried to talk to people from New York.

I was twenty-one when I joined. I was living in an apartment and majoring in pre-med and was in my fourth year of college. My soon-to-be spiritual mother lived in the same apartment complex as me, and for nine months I gave her money because I thought she was a poor, starving missionary. I enjoyed our deep conversations; we had a heartistic connection.

It was 1972 and the church's national level endeavor was to purchase Belvedere, an estate in Tarrytown, New York, which was, at the time, the summer home for the Bronfman family. The church wanted to use it as the movement's international training center. Members in America made a unified effort to make Belvedere a place to welcome Reverend and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, the True Parents of Humankind, to America. They fundraised door-to-door with homemade candles produced in the basement of the Upper- Marlboro, Maryland church center. There were 51 American missionaries that Father Moon had sent out one to each state, which is how I met my spiritual mother in Tennessee. She was selling those candles to buy Belvedere, and I bought a couple and helped her sell a few.

One day I asked her out on a date and we went out for a play, dinner and drinks. As I started to give her a good night kiss she pushed me away with both hands and told me to come to "lectures." So, that's how I ended up at my first Divine Principle lecture and became the first person to join the church in Tennessee. The date was November 28, 1972. At that point, I joined the efforts to purchase Belvedere.

Belvedere consists of a main house, a garage and a few other structures. The "training center" had actually been a garage. We cleaned that area out and it became the lecture hall, where Father Moon gave many sermons. We had to remove the oil racks, the servicing tools and the grease stains from the floor to repurpose it from the Bronfman's summer home to the training center for the Unification Church.

The following March, in 1973, the first member from every state and one member from every country in Europe was called to Belvedere for the first international training session. This was the first time international members came together in one country. The training session was 100 days long and consisted of endless hours of Divine Principle lectures. Our guest speaker every day for the first twenty-one days was Father Moon. At that time we didn't have East Garden, the Lovin' Life Ministries Learning Center, the New Yorker Hotel, the Unification Theological Seminary, anything; True Parents lived at Belvedere. Every gathering happened at Belvedere.

Early Western Unificationists from around the world gathered at Belvedere for the 100 day training session.

As first-generation Unificationists, we were fortunate to live so intimately with True Parents. Back then, Father Moon was a young, vibrant, healthy fifty-four year old with black hair and fully capable of anything. People who needed internal guidance, or who had spiritual problems, went directly to Father Moon. There was no security on the property; True Parents would just walk around the grounds and the garden and members could just walk up to them. People always wanted to ask Father Moon many things, but Mother Moon looked so young, as young as us, so we didn't often think about asking Mother Moon anything. Even the women felt this way. She was beautiful, radiant and loving but shy as well.

The chain of commanders and links between Father Moon and us was extremely short. He spoke to us throughout the day and he had personal give and take with everybody in the training center, even if it was just one or two sentences. If you were lucky, you'd give a testimony in front of him, or he'd bonk you gently on the head or ask you what country you were from. Even if he saw you in a crowd, there'd be some acknowledgement. The best time to get Father Moon on his own was at 5 a.m. He would wake up early and walk around the grounds. That's how I met Father Moon alone for the first time and had a long talk with him. Father Moon was always ready to give advice and counsel, but Mother Moon was different. I remember her always carrying a red pack of Dentyne gum, because, as a Korean who was new to America, she worried about kimchee breath. One day, I opened the car door for Mother Moon and she gave me two sticks of Dentyne gum; I still have them to this day. She always wanted to give and Father Moon always wanted to find ways to advise and counsel. These were intimate moments for me.

I was then twenty-two and had completed only 40 days of the training. We didn't realize yet that Father Moon was taking the movement from a national level to an international level and he wanted America to spearhead the effort. We soon learned that members from Europe, Japan and America would continue on with the second Day of Hope tours as an international team. None of us, however, knew what an international evangelical campaign was. There were no leaders with past experience among us. We had to put the international tour together from scratch.

I volunteered to be the bus driver for the tour, but I was still a kid and knew nothing about mechanics, only learning as I went. Sometimes when I was under the bus I would fall asleep with a wrench in my hand and it would fall and hit my head. It was a comedy of errors. The buses were from the original-national level Day of Hope tour in 1971-72. We had to paint and fix them because they were in terrible shape, ugly and not road worthy. On June 15th, 1973 I had finally fixed one of the buses. I was so proud and wanted to show it to Father Moon. True Parents walked down from the main house to the training center during an international leaders meeting and I begged Father Moon to come see the bus. Even though I presented the bus looking like a chicken with my greasy blue overalls covered in dry, yellow grass, I learned that when you're really inspired you can move True Parents. I think they were excited that this crazy red-neck guy was really into the mechanics.

I picked up many different church members in that bus, the Japanese team, the Austrian team, the German team, the Italian team and the English team for the tours. My first team was half Japanese, half European. It was like the tower of Babel. We piled into this old rickety bus that had many problems and drove it to Florida. We actually united fairly easily because we were too unique to disunite. We were like a bunch of private soldiers; we weren't thinking or questioning and we constantly woke up at ridiculous hours. We had no common language and no experience, but we had a lot of enthusiasm, which was probably the only thing we had in common.

Our lifestyle was centered on "get out of the bus and bring a thousand people to Father Moon's speech." Every two weeks we had to drive 24/7 for 1000 miles, which was a problem when America was experiencing a gas shortage. There were long lines to fill up your cars and most times, gas stations would only give us so many gallons. We were all very different, but we shared one important trait: obedience and that became apparent during the gas crisis. We were, thinking, "It has to be done," so we did it. I went out and bought 50 five-gallon gas cans and loaded them onto the bus. We drove as far as we could, with the bus reeking of gas fumes, then stopped at rest areas and filled the gas tanks of the small vans. We were desperate because True Parents were talking and we needed to get to our destination and fill up the auditorium. Obedience was our fuel.

European, Japanese and American Unificationists gathered for God's day, 1974, Boulder, CO.

The first location of the speaking tour was Carnegie Hall. At that time, we weren't just inviting people; we were charging them $7 for a ticket in 1973, which would be $21 now. That first event was packed. I couldn't even get in; I had to wait outside. In addition to ticket sales, we fundraised, but none of us knew how. We just asked for donations in parking lots. Later we figured out a way to sell peanuts by buying huge sacks of peanuts and putting them in small paper bags. We were idiotic; we had no idea what we were doing, but somehow it was working -- we got gas and food and money.

Prior to this tour, there was neither an abundance of positive nor negative press about True Parents. Actually, we had a bit of good press, received keys to multiple cities and proclamations from governors. The beginning of the movement was amazing because there was no negativity, until Christian churches in Korea communicated their disapproval to the Christian churches in America. The worst city on our tour was Des Moines, Iowa. Everywhere we went we were supposed to prepare a nice house and a nice car for True Father, a Lincoln, for example. Preparing a house was ludicrous. We'd be vacuuming and renting furniture. I rented a car on the way from the rental center to pick up Father Moon, the brakes failed. Within three hours I had to repair it in time to pick him up. During my 2-week stay in Des Moines, the first kidnapping occurred. I met and taught Stephen Foster the Divine Principle from Chapter One to Conclusion. Both he and his girlfriend were enthusiastic and wanted to join, but he was kidnapped by his parents. I was also held hostage and they wouldn't release me until they had their son. His uncle in California, a psychiatrist, committed Stephen to a medical institution. He was incarcerated and drugged. The outcome of Father's speech in Des Moines was terrible; the newspaper ended up publishing a long series of negative articles on the front page for seven days in a row.

True Parents were always expressing love to us, regardless of whether or not the speech was a success. After the last speech in every city, those who helped with the tour, along with all the local members, would meet with True Parents at McDonald's and eat together. We felt a lot of love during those late-night gatherings. We'd take up three-fourths of the restaurant and sing a song. At one point, my team even established a band that sounded like an elementary school band's "oom papa oom papa oom papa." We learned "Polarity" in time for the McDonald's party in Boulder, CO. We set up music stands and pushed aside the tables. Bringing our instruments into the restaurant was normal for us; we didn't know what was possible or impossible, what was realistic or unrealistic. True Parents were so proud of our effort. They were laughing and loved it; they even asked for an encore, but we only knew one song! I don't know how to describe it; it was such a Kodak moment. Everything we did was so outlandish; we had parties at McDonald's with True Parents.

The Day of Hope tours were the first activity that our True Parents led that we would recognize as one of the "International Mobilization Events" that are still the standard of the Unification movement. With nothing more than a single suitcase and a sleeping bag, we left our hometowns and joined as one international unified family traveling tens of thousands of miles together visiting cities that had never heard of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and organized speaking events.

We were beyond nation, culture, food and language, leaving everything behind. The only common thread that held us all together was the love of God and True Parents.