Substantiation

Kook Jin Moon
January 29, 2009

Under a tight schedule, Kook-jin nim spoke concisely to the national leaders on January 29, at the Cheon Jeong Peace Palace. Here are excerpts from his message:

How do we go from being a church that has great internal thought but no external reflection of that greatness, to a church whose external form matches its internal nature? This is the challenge we have in our church, and this is what we have not been able to accomplish up to this point. It is not God who is creating the suffering on earth. God does not create suffering. The suffering and difficulty we see all around us and all around the world today is not from God, but is our doing. It is our imperfection, our inadequacies, our jealousies, our selfishness that create the suffering in the world today. So this is the challenge that we as a movement have to overcome to move into the future.

And it's by focusing on a project like building a temple for our entire world Unification Movement -- something of substance with external form -- that we can show the entire world what our internal nature is. This is the great blessing we have at this time, because there are a number of benefits that come from focusing on doing something substantial. We have the opportunity, for the first time in our church history, to organize globally and to do so based on real, substantial goals, a clear purpose and clear goals of how much money everyone needs to raise. By pursuing this temple project we are creating a church that now focuses on not only its own internal thoughts of greatness but also thinks about how it can translate that internal nature into external form with results.

This is the wonderful blessing of this temple. We are coming to the point where if we want to succeed in building Cheon Bok Gung, we have to measure and evaluate real results, real performance. In the past, in our church's culture, evaluations were often done based on an individual's ability to make a good report. Whether or not the report was accurate or had substance was secondary. The question was whether you could make a good report, and because we had this very vague and opaque system of evaluating one's performance and ability, our performance has been very opaque....

I'm not going to tell you that you should have more faith, because faith comes from making substantial results, through give and take. As you make more results, you gain more confidence....

This is why we want to start thinking about how to change. We want to think about making an environment where we can become confident in our beliefs; and confidence in our beliefs will enable us to make real accomplishments. We will be able to go out and witness to accomplished people. We will be able to witness to them, and we will be able to ask them for funds -- because we ourselves will know that what we are doing is for the benefit of the greater good....

We want to make a much more transparent environment in our church, an open environment, where we can encourage people to make real results. This is why I think at this time it is so important and so great that we have an opportunity to focus on a project of real substance, one in which we can measure how well we are doing. We know how much money we need. How much have we made? And as we pursue the project of building Cheon Bok Gung, think about all the conversations we need to have with all of our brothers and sisters all over the world. What is the temple project about? We need to explain the temple and why it's important.

In order to explain the temple, you have to understand Divine Principle, because the way it is designed, the temple is Divine Principle. Not only that, you have to clearly give them conviction and confidence that their funds, if they do contribute, will go to the temple. As you see their funds going to the temple, you yourself will gain confidence; and as you gain confidence, you will be able to bring more and more people to our teachings. I know we have lots of difficulties and challenges currently, as other religions do. When you look at the life cycle of religions, the early stages were very difficult. Look at Christianity. Their founder was crucified. Look at Buddhism. People tried to kill the founder of Buddhism quite a few times during his lifetime. And the founder of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith, was killed.

Granted, when we look at our situation today, we see there are a lot of challenges, but we gain our hope and our strength when we think about what we are going to pursue in the future, because the goals we want to pursue are very clear. We want to pursue real results, real accomplishments. We want to build a real temple. We want to bring real members, our brothers and sisters, to join our congregation. What do I mean by "real" brothers and sisters? When you have a family, when you have brothers and sisters, why do you consider that person your brother or your sister? Because they not only share the good things you have, they also share the burdens. This is what it means to become a community of faith. It means we take upon ourselves, on our shoulders, an equal burden with every other member of our community. In sharing the burden, we become a community of faith, and as we enlarge that community of faith that shares the burden together, our community becomes stronger and we get people investing in our community. And as we invest in our community, our faith and spiritual life is strengthened. This is a virtuous cycle we can create today by focusing on a very clear goal.

I don't know how long it is going to take to build this temple. We have started the fundraising for it now.... I am very impressed and moved by our brothers and sisters in Korea. Our Korean church has not been so successful at fundraising in the past, but based upon this temple project, we have seen a great outpouring of desire to contribute. We have seen a lot of donations coming into the church. In terms of percentage of the goal accomplished based on the goals given to the different nations, our Korean church is actually in first place currently. So, we are very grateful to our brothers and sisters here.

We hope that our brothers and sisters around the world can also take an interest in the temple project. It's an opportunity for us to show real performance. And think about it, brothers and sisters, as we study the result of the temple and as we record the donations and all the names of the people who made them, an evaluation of you as ministers will come out very clearly. We will see which minister has created the most result. As you very well know, in order for you, as a minister, to get your congregation to want to assist you, to donate or tithe, you have to be a good minister and you have to minister to your congregation well. You cannot gain donations from your congregation without congregation care. I think this is the real benefit of pursuing projects like this. When we -- not only the Japanese church but our world Unification Church community -- pursue real projects, it gives us an opportunity not only to study and intellectualize our faith but to actually practice it.

When we practice what we know internally, we get real spiritual growth, so that's what we are proposing to do. I hope all of you can understand this a little bit better. I hope that all of you can cooperate and work with us at the world mission office and with our international president to make this project successful and that in the future, we can all work to continue this process of transparent evaluations based on substantial results.

We want to see leaders recognized for their real accomplishments. We want to see leaders promoted for their real contributions to our church, not just because they give us a good talk and make us feel good, but because they are leaders who invest in making our church community more durable and successful for the long term. Those leaders are not necessarily the best public speakers, but they are the ones doing the work. So, this is our challenge from now on -- to find the leaders who are really doing good work and to promote them. Not promote ourselves, but promote good people who are doing good for all of us. When we have learned to promote those who are doing good for all of us, it is only then that our external form will match our internal teaching.

I think that is the greatest truth that the Principle teaches us, the truth we have yet to substantiate as a movement. And that's the truth upon which all our leaders should reflect, whether they are living by it or not -- because it is something that is very easy to lose sight of.

I hope all of you can contribute to and help this temple building project and also work to promote good leadership in our church.

Thank you very much.