The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC) Founded

True Father established the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA- UWC, or Unification Church) on May 1, 1954. The armistice agreement ending the Korean War was signed in July 1953, and in September True Father moved from Pusan to Seoul. There, with four early followers, True Father established the new association.

According to Dr. David S.C. Kim, who was present, True Father submitted three possible names, two of which “were so complicated that we could not even comprehend the meaning of the Chinese characters.” True Father stated in his autobiography that the group chose HSA-UWC “to signify that we belonged to no denomination, and … had no plans to create a new one.” He said:

“I did not want to place ourselves in this separatist type of category. My hope was for the rise of a church without a denomination. True religion tries to save the nation, even if it has to sacrifice its own religious body to do so. … It was necessary to hang out a church sign, but in my heart I was ready to take it down at any time.”

The small group of believers gathered outside a very modest house in a very unremarkable Seoul neighborhood. Korea itself was barely beginning to recover from the devastation of the Korean War, which had ended in armistice less than ten months earlier. In his autobiography As a Peace Loving Global Citizen, True Father reflected on the ironies of those days:

“People in the neighborhood laughed at our sign. They made fun of us, asking what kind of world unification we dreamt of in that tiny little house that ‘you have to crawl to get into.’ They didn’t try to find out why we had chosen that name. They simply looked at us as if we were crazy.”