1930s

Around 1930 Rev. Moon's family, who followed traditional Confucianist beliefs, converted to Christianity and joined the Presbyterian Church, where he later taught Sunday school.

Rev. Moon claim that when he was 15, on April 17 1935, Jesus appeared to him and asked him to accomplish the work left unfinished after his crucifixion. After a period of prayer and consideration, Rev. Moon accepted the mission, later changing his name to Moon Sun-Myung.

 1940s

In the 1940s Rev. Moon cooperated in the Korean independence movement against Imperial Japan (Moon, Sun Myung (2009). As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen. Gimm-Young Publishers. ISBN 0-7166-0299-7). After the defeat of Japan (in the Second World War) in 1945, Korea was divided between Soviet and American occupation forces. In 1948 the Republic of Korea was established in the south and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, usually referred to as South Korea and North Korea.246 The government of North Korea followed Stalinist policies and sought to discourage free religious activities.

In 1941, Rev. Moon graduated from high school and went to Japan to study electronic engineering at an industrial college affiliated with Waseda University. During his time in Japan, he continued his intense prayer and search for the truth. A school friend during that time said that in his room he kept three Bibles — one in Korean, one in English and one in Japanese, which he studied continuously. He also was a Christian leader in the Korean independence movement against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Young Christians and communists were the strongest leaders of the independence movement against the Japanese occupation of Korea. In Japan, some of his closest school friends were communists and while their atheism pained him, he recognized their sincere dedication to an utopian ideal. A fellow student at that time, Aum Duk-Moon, reports that Reverend Moon defended communists to his Christian friends, saying that they were good people and that Koreans should work together to save their country. He was eventually imprisoned by the Japanese for his student underground activities and tortured for not revealing the names of his collaborators. This imprisonment was what would be his first of six imprisonments under four governments: Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the United States.

In 1944, Reverend Moon was again arrested and severely tortured by the Japanese occupation government in Korea after his name came up in the interrogation of a communist student friend who had been active in the anti-Japanese underground in Tokyo. He refused to confess and was finally released. In spite of such treatment by the Japanese; his cousin and companion at the time reports that Reverend Moon showed only love and respect to Japanese people. When the war ended in August 1945 he persuaded others not to take revenge on local Japanese officials and worked secretly to get them safe transport back to Japan.

In 1945, after the ending of World War II and the Japanese occupation, Rev. Moon began preaching his message. A year later he had a revelation from God urging him to leave his family without notifying them and go to communist North Korea to preach.

In 1946, Rev. Moon traveled alone to Pyongyang in Communist-ruled North Korea. Before World War II, the center of Korean Christian activity was Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea; it was called the "Jerusalem of the East." Among the spirit-filled churches were many with strong messianic expectations. Some of these churches had received revelations that the Messiah would be born in Korea, and they were directed in various ways to prepare to receive him. From the late forties 166 priests and other religious figures were killed or disappeared in concentration camps, including Francis Hong Yong-Ho, bishop of Pyongyang and all monks of Tokwon abbey. No Catholic priest survived the persecution, all churches were destroyed and the government never allowed any foreign priest to set up in North Korea. Despite the dangers, he began to teach publicly.

In 1946, Rev. Moon, while he was living in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, more vulnerable than leaders of the established churches, and not supported by them, was charged with disturbing the social order; in November 1946, the young minister was imprisoned and tortured.

In April 1948, he was arrested a second time by the North Korean authorities on allegations of spying for South Korea and given a five-year sentence to the Hungnam labor camp. He was among the first of the Christian ministers sent to the Soviet-style North Korean gulag. Hungnam was an extermination camp where prisoners were deliberately worked to death. Few lasted more than six months. Yet in that horrific concentration camp, Reverend Moon survived for nearly three years.

1950s

In 1950, after serving 34 months of his sentence, Rev. Moon escaped from North Korea during the Korean War when United Nations troops advanced on the camp and the guards fled. He then fled to Pusan, South Korea.

On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army invaded the South in a lightning attempt to unify the entire peninsula by force. UN and American forces, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, rescued the beleaguered South. One month after the capture of Seoul, UN forces reached the gates of Hungnam prison. Knowing the UN forces were near, the communist prison authorities began to execute the prisoners. The prison camp was liberated by UN forces just hours before Reverend Moon's scheduled execution.

Despite his brutal prison camp experience, Reverend Moon did not immediately flee to the South. Instead, he returned to Pyongyang and spent forty days searching for the members of his scattered flock. He eventually found a few members and then traveled to the south on foot with two of them. One of his followers had a broken leg and protested that he would slow the party down. Reverend Moon insisted on bringing him and for the long trek either pushed him on a bicycle or carried him on his back on some occasion.