We were not a rich church. We were a poor church started by people who couldn’t afford enough food to keep themselves well fed. We didn’t have the fancy church buildings that other churches had, but we ate barley when others ate rice and saved our money a little at a time. We then shared that money with people who were poorer than we. Our missionaries slept in unheated rooms by laying their sleeping quilts on the bare cement floors. When meal time came, it was common for them to stave off their hunger by eating a few cooked potatoes. In every case, we did our best not to spend money on ourselves.

       In 1963, we used the money we had saved this way to select seventeen children and form a Seonghwa children’s dance troupe called the Little Angels. Korea in those days had very little in the way of cultural performances. We had nothing to show people from other countries, let alone performances that we ourselves could watch and enjoy. Everyone was too busy trying to survive to remember what Korean dance was like or even the fact that we had a cultural heritage extending back five thousand years.

       My plan was to have these seventeen children learn how to dance and then send them out into the world. Many foreigners knew about Korea only as a poor country that had fought a terrible war. I wanted to show them the beautiful dances of Korea so that they would realize that the Korean people are a people of culture. We could insist all we wanted that we were a people of culture with a five-thousand-year tradition, but no one would believe us if we had nothing to show them.