The entrepreneur and social services leader had a novel vision for sharing the gospel and reaching people holistically.
Peter Chih-Ping Lin (林治平), who launched a Christian magazine for those outside the church that grew right into a sprawling, eclectic ministry, died of pancreatic cancer on April 27 on the age of 86 in Taipei. With little financial support, in 1973, Lin founded what became Christian Cosmic Light Holistic Care Organization, which sought to achieve non-Christians through art, academic research, and social work. As a pacesetter in Christian social services, Lin’s concern for the marginalized led him to guide the Christian drug rehab organization Operation Dawn in Taiwan and to reset the vision of Bethany Children’s Home.
Lin’s work often operated on a shoestring budget, forcing him to be entrepreneurial and to depend on his faith.
“When we walk in God’s calling and what he has entrusted us with faith, God will definitely lead us through all of the hardships and trials for us to complete the missions we supply,” Lin wrote in 2023, in a problem commemorating Cosmic Light’s fiftieth anniversary.
Lin was born in Changsha, a city in Hunan Province in central China, on May 22, 1938, not long after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Because his father served within the Chinese air force, frequently facing Japanese airstrikes and heavy artillery, Lin’s childhood was always disrupted. For the primary ten years of his life, his family lived in nearly half of China’s 23 provinces, and his parents named their son Chih-Ping (Chih means “to rule,” Ping means “peace”), expressing their desire that, at some point, he would know stability.
This dream was only realized after Lin lost his sister, and his mother and the remaining children fled to Taiwan in 1948. At age 10, Lin was now living in a farming …
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