120 US Pastors Join Global Peace Tour, Hope to Defuse Korean Nuclear Crisis

October 21, 2006
UPF-International

A delegation of 120 US pastors, imams and religious leaders begin a worldwide peace mission Saturday that will take them throughout the United States, Japan and Korea and on to the 38th parallel with North Korea, the latest and most unwelcome member of the world’s nuclear club – visiting over 300 cities in just one week. The tour is expected to continue to 120 nations by the end of 2006.

The peace effort is being coordinated by the Universal Peace Federation, founded by the Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon. It is already the 4th tour in less than a year. Earlier tours were conducted first by Moon himself, then by his wife, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon and their children, and most recently a third generation of the Moon’s grandchildren joined the campaign, speaking in over 400 cities worldwide in just 40 days.

Organizers say the goal of the tours is to provide a middle ground between secular peace efforts on the one hand and extreme religious positions on the other, and to promote a God-centered global vision for world peace.

For years, Moon has been calling for the creation of a peace council at the United Nations, consisting of people who, although patriotic, work for whole purposes beyond their own nation; and, although deeply religious, work for the whole purposes beyond their own religion.

The US delegation includes many prominent ministers who are no strangers to the struggle for peace, having worked over many decades on issues such as civil rights, religious freedom, family values and more. Still, responding to Rev. Moon’s sudden call to travel overseas at a moment’s notice is something well out of the ordinary.

“The World Peace ministry of the Reverend and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon has struck a very responsive note in the very depths of my soul,” says former DC Congressman Rev. Walter Fauntroy. “That’s because all that I am and all that I hope to be I owe to the mission on which I embarked now some forty five years ago with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His message was simply this: ‘Either we learn to live together as brothers and sisters on this planet or we will perish together as fools.’ I love Father Moon’s ministry because he seems as determined as Martin was to do something about world peace, not just talk about it.”