By Tyler Hendricks

My recent video, “Thoughts on Sanctuary Church,” elicited affirmative responses as well as detailed criticism and ad hominem comments. I’m grateful for it all and want to summarize “Thoughts” and the main criticisms, and respond to the latter.

I began with the logic of Sanctuary’s story, which Dr. Richard Panzer, Sanctuary’s president, affirmed as accurate: True Parents are doing fine; True Parents appoint Hyung Jin Nim’s couple to be their heir; True Father dies and True Mother goes off track; centering on True Father, Hyung Jin Nim’s couple restores True Parents.

I pointed out the error in this logic: If True Mother went off track, then True Parents weren’t really doing fine; if True Parents weren’t really doing fine, the appointment of Hyung Jin Nim’s couple is not valid, which means he’s not the heir of anything.

I understand why some don’t agree with the first point. By “doing fine” I meant the perfection of their marital love as True Parents, from which the Divine Principle says we cannot fall, because to believe otherwise would deny the omnipotence of God, the perfectibility of goodness itself, and the perfection of God (Exposition of the Divine Principle, p. 42). Simply put, true love is eternal, so if True Mother has gone off track, then her love was temporary, and she and True Father did not have true love. This means they weren’t True Parents. True Parents is not people as much as it is a relationship.

I then worked backward from the Sanctuary premise that the appointment is valid. If so, then True Parents were fine; if True Parents were fine, then True Mother was fine; if True Mother was fine, then she would not go off track; if True Mother is not off track, then she is True Parents; if True Mother is True Parents, then Hyung Jin Nim has to attend her; if Hyung Jin Nim is not attending her, then he is off track.

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By Jack LaValley

Is it possible our current Sunday service is lacking some core elements of persuasion and conviction that speak to the heart of our need for rebirth and salvation?  Are few new people joining our movement through our Sunday service because we don’t offer them what they really need, when they do show up?  If so, what can we do about it?  A specific kind of alternative service can help us attract and hold more “first-timers” and bring spiritual renewal and revival to our ranks.

Robin Debacker conducted a survey that gathered information from Unificationists about their Sunday service experiences. Contacting individuals via private Facebook messages, she collected 350 responses over a four-month period — two-thirds from the 50+ age group, and 103 from second gen.  Responses came from 195 cities around the world — 38 states in the U.S. and 32 countries.  In summer 2014, the survey results were discussed on this Blog and presented on her website dedicated to that project. Key facts gleaned from her survey were:

• Nearly 25% of those surveyed do not attend a Unification service, and have distanced themselves or dropped out entirely.
• 70% of those who indicated they attend a service on a regular basis said they are not inspired, and do so out of a sense of duty, or for social reasons only.
• The majority of second gen respondents said that most of their second gen friends are not interested and do not attend a Unificationist service. Of those who do attend, many said they are searching for more open and honest discussion, more practical application, and more second gen leadership.

The Sunday service program model still remains the primary weekly gathering in the Unificationist faith community. Yet that model has failed to be the gateway program to persuade and convict the “unchurched” and “spiritual” seekers to become intimately involved with our faith community. Some  have “joined” through Sunday service, but not that many.  In some areas, efforts have been made to use home church, tribal messiahship or small group models to address how to “bring non-Unificationists into the fold,” but such efforts have yet to gain the prestige or influence of Sunday service.

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By Tyler Hendricks

Our Unification movement exemplifies two church models, and serves as a case study of their effect on church growth. Church growth has regular causes that can be discerned by examining churches that are growing. Church decline also has regular causes that can be discerned by examining churches that are shrinking. The defining characteristic of most growing churches is that they have one mission, that being evangelism, and congregational polity. Most shrinking churches have multiple missions and hierarchical polity.

For a church to have an evangelical mission means the church is organized to proclaim the good news (the “evangel”) and to bring others to salvation through it. Congregational polity means that the members of the local church own and govern the local church.

To have a hierarchical polity means that pastors are employed and directed by a central authority. Through the pastors, the central authority, which owns all properties, guides the planning, schedule, strategies, style, etc., for each congregation. Such churches tend to have multiple missions and pay little attention to evangelism.

Thesis #1: The Unification Church grew when and where it had an evangelical mission and congregational polity

Founding of the church: The Unification Church grew from one spirit-led man starting a local congregation. The church had an evangelical mission and congregational polity. He taught and preached a God-centered biblical vision for world transformation. He prayed incessantly. His mission began with a vision of Jesus; people who joined testified that it was the spirit world that led them to him. He loved and served others to bring them into his church, sleeping and eating little, giving up his family, worrying not about physical needs. That was how it started.

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By John Redmond

One of the great ironies of many successful religious movements is that they almost always start from failure — from a secular and mainstream point of view.  Christianity had its charismatic young leader crucified as a rabble rouser for tipping over the tables in the temple. Christians spent years in intellectual gymnastics explaining how the messiah was born an illegitimate child and killed as a criminal.

The Pilgrim Fathers were driven out of England, as were many of the other colonists who settled in the New World.  The Latter Day Saints (Mormons) were driven westward to the American desert to die, their founder lynched and religion mocked.

Yet these movements found multi-generational success in preaching, modeling and promoting the values and doctrines that gave them fulfillment and improved the culture around them.

This doesn’t happen by accident.  Successfully attracting and maintaining believers over multiple generations and changing the values of a culture requires a combination of good leadership and good management, and they are not the same thing.

Leadership requires communicating and validating a shared vision to a group of people you may or may not control. Reverend Moon could cast that vision, and many people, even those uncomfortable with his management style, could agree with that large and inclusive ideal and, perhaps more importantly, sense the heart behind it.

Management is the control of money, processes and people to achieve a desired product or outcome.  I’ve never been impressed with many Unification managers, who mostly mean well, but have little success or training from the real world on which to base their decisions.  They mostly default to Theory X management, micro-managing the behavior of their members rather than nurturing their goals, activities and creativity — or they swing to the other side, to religious-based trust and out-of-control management systems.  A movement with a great vision but poor management may succeed, but its progress is measured in millennia rather than years.

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