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
Dan Fefferman and no charges were pressed. In 1977 Fefferman served as leader of the Unification Church in the state of Illinois, as well as regional church director for the Midwestern United States. In 1982, he was headquarters director and national president of Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), a collegiate organization founded by Moon and church members in 1955. It was described by "The Washington Post" as "the youth organization of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church", and by the ICSA as "the UC's youth arm". Fefferman was the editor of the national journal of the Unification Church