The Words of Kook Jin Moon
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The Words of Kook Jin Moon |
Hello, brothers and sisters. I’m very happy to see all of you today. I just must say I am extremely inspired to see our new leader of the Unification Church movement here in America. You know what inspires me the most about her? She actually speaks fluent English. You spoke wonderfully today, sis. We’re really proud of you and we know you’re going to do a super job. I’d like to thank you for your warm response. For me, I must say, usually when people see me they run because honestly, to tell you the truth, if you have to meet me in private, I’m going to be probably firing you. So this is the nature of my job. My job is actually to deliver the pink slips. So for your warm response I’m truly grateful.
For the last now four years our True Father has asked me to work for him. He actually drafted me because I was happily employed running my own business. But apparently Father needed somebody to fix some of the problems he had in Korea and so he asked me to come. So I’ve been working now for True Father as my public service and doing the best that I can to try to help the church out.
For the last four years we’ve been doing a lot of restructuring. That means the companies which we had, we’ve had to downsize many of them, we sold many of them, and as a result we’ve been able to make our business group in Korea profitable. But now we’ve been given this extra challenge of this recessionary economy, and now we have even more restructuring to do to overcome this difficult time.
So at this time we have many, many challenges for our movement, not only in the businesses but also in the church. I don’t know if many of you have noticed but during the last 20 years our movement hasn’t really been growing. That’s true here in America but it’s also very true in Korea. We’ve actually been stagnating as a church. We haven’t had much church growth. If you study the results of the last 20 years you can see Sunday service attendance flat or declining. The donations to the church, tithing, have been declining. And during that period we did so much PR work, so many events, where we had different events or different organizations, even big rallies of 100,000 people. But yet those activities did not make any result. So this is something which is fundamentally a problem which we face in our Unification movement.
This problem is something which I believe as brothers and sisters and members of this church we should start to seriously address because we are not just a community of people who have individual opinions. We are a community entrusted with a very specific mission given to us by God through our True Parents. As you well know, when you have a mission, you have responsibility. We will ultimately be held accountable for our actions and activities and the results of those actions and activities, in this world or the next. So let me share with you why I feel so strongly about this issue.
You know, brothers and sisters, God has really given through our True Parents to all of us an incredible truth, and that truth and the teaching of our Divine Principle can be summed up actually with just one sentence. This is the power of the word that we have been given. That can be summed up very simply, that we as individuals, our responsibility is very simple. It is to inherit the true love of God. This is the essence of True Father’s teaching. What does that mean? It’s very simple. If you have a chance to study Christian theology, it’s very deep of course. In many regards Jesus Christ gave us a great message, to do unto others as you would have done unto yourself, and from that we learn so many lessons of brotherhood -- friendship, care, concern, and compassion.
But if you study Christian theology, they teach you very specifically and clearly that the essence of God and His divinity cannot be known because God is both omniscient and omnipotent, and therefore we as individual human beings, beings of limited understanding and knowledge and power, that we as such small things of creation can never understand the fullness, the full divinity of the creator. This is what Christianity teaches us.
But if you think about it from another point of view, as small human beings and as individuals in this world we may say, wow, God is great. He’s so all-powerful and mighty and we’re so powerless -- it may sound good to us that we’re able to worship such a high and mighty God. But think about it from God’s point of view. From God’s point of view, what are we doing? We are condemning God to an eternity of loneliness, of being by himself, because nobody can ever touch him. If you cannot know God, then God is truly alone. And if God is alone then he is truly the God of suffering and of angst.
This is the great revelation which our True Parents bring to us -- he has informed us about the suffering of God, the heartache of God. And he has proclaimed in the Peace Messages and told us very clearly that God’s divinity can be known. And he’s explained to us very clearly what that divinity is. The divinity of God is true love and true love is a love that can bring even Satan to voluntary surrender.
It is because of this revelation that God has been liberated and freed. It is because of this revelation that we can speak of humanity being one family under God. And this is the powerful message and the powerful truth that our True Parents have brought to this world and to all of us. And this is why, brothers and sisters, we are not a community of folk who live for the sake of ourselves, but we are a community with a mission, a mission to spread this truth and this word and this understanding to all people of the world.
That means that we have to hold our leaders accountable for results and performance, and we have to demand results and performance. We have to see growth in membership, we have to see growth in contributions. Brothers and sisters, it is a time now where we no longer talk about creating the ideal world or creating the nation of Cheon Il Guk. It is a time now when we actually substantially can actually build it, and this is our mission. This is why we have responsibility. This is why we have to hold our leadership accountable from today forth.
I’ve been working in business a long time so actually when you study the language of business, it’s not actually a language of words, but a language of numbers. And we use those numbers to understand and measure our performance and results so that we can take out opinions and we can focus on facts. And by being able to do that, then we can measure who’s actually contributed. And really that’s what we need to do. We need to be able to see the facts clearly, so that those who make real results can be heard. Those voices of actual contribution can be heard. That’s what we need. We need to elevate those who do, elevate those who create, elevate those who contribute. Honor them, spotlight them, give them the podium, listen to them. The people who just spew a lot of air without doing anything, those people need to learn to be silent and listen and learn from those who do.
This is a great country. America is a great land, the land of freedom and individual responsibility and individual courage. And we have those people here in our American movement, men of courage and responsibility. I would be most pleased if you Americans take pride in your church, take pride in your mission which is given to you by God, and really unite with your new leader, head of the Unification Church here in America, In Jin Moon, to really make the Unification Church in America successful. That would make me most pleased and proud, and would make our True Parents most pleased and proud.
With that said, I don’t want to take any more of your time. I know you’re very busy people, and especially you have a lot of work to do, so I’ll close my statement. Thank you very much.