The Words of Kook Jin Moon
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The Words of Kook Jin Moon |
Kook Jin Nim did a 120 church tour in Korea and could see the situation of the church there. Since Kook Jin Nim took responsibility over the Korean Foundation the businesses are turning around to make profit instead of burdening true parents financially. He shows his filial heart and devotion through his work. Lately Father told Kook Jin Nim to take responsibility for the Japanese providence. Japan has been investing itself totally for the providence, Father understands this and believes Kook Jin Nim is the one to revive Japan.
I’m sorry you all had to stay up so late to go to church; I’m here to give a little talk to explain what we’re trying to do for the development of the church. I’d like to thank you for you contributions for the new temple in Korea. Europe was 3rd after Japan and Korea in the donations.
My work is in improving the management of our church. Originally I was working with the Korean business foundation, restructuring it and making them profitable. It’s a good thing that happened because now the general economy is doing poorly.
Then we started looking at our church, and there are serious problems. For the past 20 years it has been in stagnation and decline. I visited 120 churches in Korea and I saw the problem with management, or rather the lack of management.
You can get discouraged, but with experience in life problems can be seen as opportunities. Because if things are not working well, then you can make them work well. We’re a young church; we need to understand it’s only 40-50 years old. The Catholic Church is 2000 years old, they have had a lot more time to develop procedure and canon law. We need time, too.
Initially our church grew a lot, and then we started facing the problems that our success created. I’m sure you all know we have a lot to offer as a movement: the principle and the truth True Parents gave to us is extremely powerful. It’s shameful we haven't expanded our church more. All this is due to our youth as an organization, and the fact that the Christian foundation didn’t accept True Parents.
At this time we need to look at the direction our movement is going and will go in the future. We need to see how we can establish True Parent’s vision. In the past few years True Parents have talked a lot about establishing Cheon Il Guk (CIG). For many of us, thinking of CIG, we cannot conceptualize what it means. What is CIG? How do we create it? When do we know it’s here? Then there are other questions: How can we contribute to build it? These are questions we need to solve and get answers for, make it simple so we can move forward. For someone to move toward a goal, we need a clear vision for that goal. I like to explain things simple.
We as humanity have received incredible blessings to prepare for the 2nd coming, and one of those blessings is democracy. If we want to restore a nation, then 50% of a nation needs to be in our church, it’s simple. If we re-define CIG, then we can work toward that goal, now that we’ve made the goal clear we can then work toward it. It might take longer than 7 years, it may take 70 or 700 years, if we work toward that goal then we can fulfill it. We need a clear vision of what we want to create.
The next question is, if we want 50% of a nation, how do we do it? How do we witness to half a country? I think it’s not too difficult or complex. It’s the reason why at this time True Parents are putting forward in our work to build the Cheon-bok Gung, the new Unification HQ.
When our world chairman started his ministry he had 70 members, now he has 6,700 members. I don’t know if you’ve been to HQ in Korea, Cheon-pa Dong. It’s not that big and to accommodate the congregation we do 7 services a week. Its’ a big change; when he started he did one service with 100 people there, then change came quickly.
In the Tongil group, there are a lot of companies. When I came there less than 10% of employees were church members. In the last 2 years, since we’ve been re-educating the staff, we probably brought 500 to 600 employees into the church. They come to church and tithe; they donate to Cheon-bok Gung. Since we started the Cheon-bok Gung providence we’ve raised 80 million dollars. We signed a contract to buy one of the city halls in Seoul, and we have 50 days left to raise another 5 million, so then we have a growth stage Cheon-bok Gung.
It’s probably 6 times bigger than our current HQ. We’ll be able to have 3,000 people per service, and with 6 services we will have about 16,000 people coming. That becomes a serious church, but that’s just the growth stage. Then we’re going another step up. Because the goal we have is to have a church for 210,000 people.
Think about it. When we achieve a perfection level church, it’s no longer the church of a single denomination, it’s a national institution. As that, it puts us in the position to converse directly with the nation, and if we can talk with the nation, then we can convert the nation. It’s just that simple, not difficult. The point we’re making is this: if we have a goal and a will and if we work together, we can substantially fulfill our vision of what we want the world to look like. We have the power to create the nation of CIG, to build the perfection level Cheon-bok Gung. If we want to do it, it’ll happen.
The interesting thing is this: our community isn’t that big yet. By the time we finish renovations for the growth level church, we’ll have invested 100 million, but for the perfection level we’re going to need another 500 to 600 million dollars. If we want to do that we’re going to need a lot more people to donate to that. We need to become a universal church that can bring people in and inspire them to donate to it.
Our challenge is to expand and share that vision, not just share, but to bring people into our family and share our burdens. When you think about family, what is a family? What do we mean by family? Have you thought about it? A family is a group of individuals. Of course you share the good times, but you really call someone your brother or sister when you share the burdens and difficulties. As we witness and bring people into our family, this is the direction we have to go. We need to get people who are willing to share the burdens. The nature with which we interact with people outside our community has to change.
We’ve done a lot of events and shared the good times with these people, but have we ever tried to share with them the burdens? No. So we’ve spent so much energy into them, but they never help us back.
We did a study in Korea: we spent 200 million dollars over the past 10 years into events and the results were a decrease in membership and tithing. I don’t know what your experience in Europe is, but it’s something to think about.
We’re pursuing the direction to build the congregation. Unless explicitly commanded by Father, we don’t do events, we want to build the church, get people to give 10% tithing, and explain to people not just about sharing joys but also our burdens. We don’t want to waste money.
That’s why Cheon-bok Gung is important, because it gives us that clear direction. Our church is focused on building our brotherhood of faith, bringing all the people of the world into our community. Once we build the temple, it becomes clear to all the Unificationists that this is, what we have to do. Once the world temple is done, it’s clear that you have to build the national temples.
How do we do it? How do we get people to give us their checks? (It’s not a small amount of money we need.) Also this is simple. The truth we have is profound. It can be put into one sentence. Our faith is not difficult to explain. When you talk with people, you only really have 2 minutes to do it, otherwise you lose their interest and you lose that person. So as a community we have to understand how to do 2 min witnessing. That’s the power of our teaching -- we can explain it in one sentence: inherit the true love of God. That’s 90% of our theology.
People will then ask, what does that mean? And then you can explain it. If you look at the peace messages, True Father explains what the divine essence of God is this: God is true love. For those of you who have grown up in the church you might not understand the significance of this, but to say that the divine essence of God is true love, for other theologies that’s like a nuclear bomb. In Christian theology God’s divinity cannot be known, because we’re lowly human beings who cannot understand Him. Christians say, “God you’re too great and mighty, so you will be forever lonely.” That is the theology of Christianity.
The teachings of Jesus are great in bringing people together, but God becomes isolated in the corner where he is by Himself, that is the reality of Christianity. That is the power of what True Parents give us in the liberation of God. He says, the divinity of God is not unknown to men. He says, we can know true love. He says, we can even bring Satan to voluntary surrender, and when we inherit this love, then we become like God. We approach his value and divinity. When the people of the world understand this truth and inherit the divinity of God then the world of sin and evil will transform to a world of good, and this is CIG. Think about it, it’s very simple, principle is very cohesive. The conclusion is that our theology is very marketable, very easy to explain to people. And this is, why we’ve raised all this money, because it’s easier to bring them in.
In Japan the people who donated the most money are the people who have been in the church from 3 months to 1 year, that’s the period where they donate the most money. When people join, they bring in a lot of resources, and then we can fulfill our vision. Church growth is not that difficult. Our church has inherited so much value, it’s not difficult.
I invite all of you to pick up this power and use it, then all of us will be liberated.
Thank you very much.