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
Unification movement colloquial term sometimes used to refer to members of the Unification movement. This is derived from the name of the UC's founder Sun Myung Moon, and was first used in 1974 by the American media. Unification movement members have used the word "Moonie", including Moon himself, President of the Unification Theological Seminary David Kim, and Bo Hi Pak, Moon's aide and president of Little Angels Children's Folk Ballet of Korea. In the 1980s and 1990s the Unification Church of the United States undertook an extensive public relations campaign against the use of the word by the news media. In 1989