Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church was first held in 1961 for 36 couples in Seoul, South Korea by Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han, shortly after their own marriage in 1960. All the couples were members of the Unification Church. Moon matched all of the couples except the 12 who were already married to each other from before joining the church, which was officially founded in 1954. Later Blessing ceremonies were larger in scale but followed the same pattern with all participants Unification Church members and Moon matching most of the couples. In 1982 the first large scale Blessing held outside of
Sun Myung Moon Moon for introducing doctrines which tended to divide the Christian church rather than uniting it, which was his stated purpose in founding the Unification Church (originally named the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity). In his 2009 autobiography Moon himself wrote that he did not originally intend on founding a separate denomination at all. Moon has been criticized for basing some of his theology on that of his former pastor Baek Moon Kim. Kim wrote down his theology in a book, titled "The Fundamental Christian Principles". It was around this same time that Moon began to claim