Young Oon Kim

Who was Young Oon Kim?

Young Oon Kim was a leading theologian of the Unification Church and its first missionary to the United States.

Kim was a professor of religion at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea. After she joined the Unification Church, church founder Sun Myung Moon sent her to the United States as a missionary in January 1959. In the 1960s, while a missionary in Oregon and California, she worked to promote Unification Church theology to mainstream Christian churches. She was also the first person to translate the Divine Principle, the basic textbook of Unification Church teaching, from Korean to English. From 1975 to 1988 she was a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York, and the first Unification Church member on the faculty there.